Opinions are mine, and reflect experiences and insights. They might be helpful for you or they might not be, they come with no warranty and you should have no expectation, apart that they might be mildly amusing to read.

June 9, 2020

It's time for the next step in SEPA

The first step in SEPA was the Euro, the second one was IBAN and SCT/SDD schemes implementation, and I propose the third one is enabling inclusion and mobility. As I stumbled across the article from Lars Markull, “Brief history of IBANs and current Fintech challenges” it stirred up some thinking and ideas I was having in the past. The article is a great source on what exactly IBANs are, but that is irrelevant for the end user.

May 22, 2020

Digital Signup - Iterate, Iterate and when done, improve even more

I started my professional career in the Telecom Industry in the end of the 90s, bringing a service to consumers (Internet Access Provider) that was turning from somewhat niche (BBS, UseNet, …) into mainstream offering (Connection, Portal, Search, Web, Hosting…). The Internet Access Provider made big strides in digitalisation, where it was easy because we could assume that everybody who wanted to surf the Internet had at least a computer. But we had started out with mailing (snail mail) or faxing signup forms, that resulted us sending back an “Access Kit”.

February 7, 2020

Banking landscape (r)evolution

Today’s landscape of traditional Banks and Institutions versus Neobanks and FinTechs is in for some big waves and changes. The traditional banks have been able to “digitalize” with mixed success. They implemented the mandatory systems in order to stay relevant and continue to participate in the systems that provide foundational services. In these highly specialized settings while being dragged down by legacy systems and siloed organization, heavily impacted by 90 IT paradigms, most environments are not appealing for the CS engineer under 30 years old.

January 13, 2020

Empathy

Back in 2017, I was interviewing people for a position as a system administrator. I have been adamant about DevOps, and obviously this was a specific question around what the opinion of the candidate was around DevOps. Over the course of the years, I have heard many people ‘define’ the term, explaining either what it meant as a solution, some were more considerate about the collaboration and mindset aspects. But this candidate floored me.

January 6, 2020

Scrum

Some of my personal thoughts, observations and discussions I had on Scrum, as being a method to be Agile. There are lot of opinions on Scrum, and it’s very easy to be carried away by the Agile Evangelists, completely forgetting the objective and the problem is targeted to be solved by Scrum. Scrum is a way of working of a team Scrum basically means that a team commits to deliver something in a pre-defined timeframe.

November 2, 2019

Home, sweet home

Wel we can have gathered most beautiful website, if it’s not possible for people visiting it, then it’s useless. Publishing content is what this is all about in the first place. You can be the greatest writer that never got published, the best painter of your generation that has no space in an exhibition, the best singer songwriter that has no audience. If you create, you need to get your stuff out there.