Frederick Vanbrabant's
delirious rantings

You don't hire juniors to do menial chores

There is this line of thought that has been bugging me for a while now: “With the coming of LLMs we don’t need juniors anymore”. The idea is that all the boring work (boilerplate, etc.) can be handled by LLMs, and we can now just focus on the real work.

As you’ve probably heard a million times by now, the counterargument to not hiring juniors is the question of succession. Who will be your future seniors? When I’ve asked that question before, I often hear company leaders say that they aren’t in the business of education and that schools should reassess how they bring young people into the job market.

I don't think AI will make your processes go faster

I have the feeling that every organization out there is, at least partially, focusing on process optimization, something that often happens when the market is down. These days there is also the AI angle to the entire thing, and the unrealistic expectations that follow it.

To come fully prepared for this, I’ve decided to re-read two absolute classics in this space: The Toyota way & The Goal ¹. I’ve read both of these books in college, but re-reading them made me realize that a lot of these process optimization exercises are too simplistic in nature, and often misunderstand what to focus on.

"What’s In It For Me" Architecture

I recently read the quote, ‘The best architecture that isn’t implemented is just an expensive drawing,’ and I couldn’t agree more. I wish I came up with it.

When organisations hire for architecture roles they always look for extremely technical and knowledgeable people. While it is true that you need deep technical knowledge to set up large-scale architecture outlines, it’s all worthless if you can’t convince people to actually implement it.

Governance: Documentation as a Knowledge Network

If you’ve known me for long enough, there will be a point where I’m going to pitch you the concept of Obsidian. I adore that program¹, I basically live my life in it. Everything is connected, and ideas just bubble up on their own.

That love for Obsidian is always amplified when I have to look up something on an organisational documentation platform. I can never find anything, it’s always out of date, and it has conflicting ideas all over the place. I’m pretty sure you can relate (if you even have one).

The middle ground between canonical models and data mesh

Some years ago I worked with a scale-up that was really focused on the way they handled data in their product. They extensively argued over data language, had value objects everywhere, explicit models and, even hexagonal architecture.

It was a cool place to work, with a lot of smart people.

At some point they started to talk about standardizing their data transfer objects, the data that flows over the API connections, in these common models. The idea was that there would be a single Invoice, User, Customer concept that they can document, standardize and share over their entire application landscape.