Chris King

Observability is the feedback loop of feedback loops, the sense-making capability of complex sociotechnical systems. If you're trying to interrupt a software engineering doom loop, observability is where to start. Ah.. I should go post my slides now. Thanks for the reminder, Ivan Milanov ;)

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This is the story of how we used our knowledge graph technology to help Knowunity build Germany’s largest connected student community. Knowunity came to us with a challenge we love: millions of notes, millions of learners - how do you connect the people who should be learning together? With cognee, we turned 40,000 anonymized learner records into a study graph that thinks like an educator and formed around factors like shared academic challenges, common spaces, overlapping routines, and mutual needs. The inputs were privacy-first. From there, we built a structured data model and a streamlined ingestion pipeline, then constructed a dynamic knowledge graph where each student node was connected to academic context and to IP addresses. Those connections carried weights, so repeated shared IP usage created stronger edges between students who likely shared the same classrooms or libraries. Two analyses brought the network to life. Densest subgraph detection grouped students who consistently showed up together on the same IPs. We also matched students by academic similarity and then strengthened those matches when the data showed physical proximity, which produced suggestions that felt both compatible and practical. Result: Germany’s largest connected student community inside Knowunity - moving beyond content to connections that actually drive shared-success. Knowunity could answer previously impossible questions with intelligent predictive community identification. This project proved what's possible when network intelligence is applied to educational challenges. We wrote up the full approach - link in comments 👇

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Is knowing German a must to be a TYPO3 Developer? 🤔 Lately, I’ve been reflecting on something that many international TYPO3 developers are quietly thinking: Is it really that hard to be part of the TYPO3 ecosystem if you're not fluent in German? TYPO3 has deep roots in Germany — that’s no secret. Many agencies, clients, and even documentation default to German. But does that mean skilled developers from outside the Germany region are locked out unless they speak the language? Let’s consider the reality: 🔹 A developer’s main job is to build robust, scalable solutions. 🔹 Communication with clients typically happens via product owners or project managers. 🔹 Clear technical documentation, good planning, and agile workflows should transcend language. And yet, many talented devs are sidelined because they’re not fluent in German. Is it time we rethink this? Should TYPO3 aim to be more internationally accessible — not just in code, but in culture and communication? I'm curious to hear from other TYPO3 professionals. Have you experienced this barrier yourself? What’s worked for your teams? Let’s start a conversation. 👇 #TYPO3 #WebDevelopment

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I've built a SaaS tool in 48h a few weeks ago as a vibe coding challenge (the weekend when it was raining non-stop in Munich, summer plans got canceled, so why not build instead 😉) Here is what I've learned: - The more specific you are the better results you'd get from the AI. - It is sometimes faster to make changes in the code yourself rather than explaining AI how to do it. Programming knowledge really helps with vibe coding. - AI is not a mind-reader, you have to explain things in detail, adding screenshots helps a lot. - My favorite combo for vibe coding is: Lovable + Cursor + Claude + Gemini. You don't have to chose one tool, the combination makes them more efficient. - Thinking about something takes longer than building it. - Debugging takes longer than both thinking & building 😅 Building this fast was something that used to be impossible a few years ago. AI is changing the way we work and the people who are not up to date will be left behind. I'm building multiple vibe coded products now, building software was never this easy and this much fun. Let's see which products will actually stick 😊 Follow for more vibe coding insights ;)

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Hey there! Yesterday at the Creative Code Berlin meetup I talked about the latest improvement I've made on CraZeApp, this time on the web version, about how to use JS libraries to do hand-tracking via the webcam in order to draw with the hand's movements I had explored this before with Kinect and LeapMotion but wanted to find a way that anyone can try without needing any specialized hardware I talked about my experience trying HandsFreeJS (a wrapper for MediaPipe models), or serving MediaPipeHands directly with TensorFlowJS, some advantages and disadvantages of each method, and I'm planning to try it too with ml5.js as well as exploring head and whole-body tracking, and the possibility of adding the same functionality on the iOS and Android native app versions You can try this on the web version of the app, then pressing on the "Camera Motion Control" button on the side menu https://lnkd.in/dtbUyBJH The best of all is that this works well on almost any mobile device, even on my iPad from 2016 with minimal input lag, showing how lightweight and performant these body motion tracking models are, even running in-browser! You can find the rest of the app's links at https://craze.app Thanks for reading! Any feedback on the app is appreciated, as well as any questions you have on my experience using these libraries

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💭 𝐉𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐚 𝐓𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐠𝐡𝐭 — with Adrian Wandinger ☺️ This year starts with a thought — why do so many good ideas stay unspoken? Have you ever held back an idea — not because it wasn’t good, but because you weren’t sure it was welcome? So I asked Adrian Wandinger, Software Engineer & Scrum Master at iba AG and a Soft Skills trainer at Board of European Students of Technology: “𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭’𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 𝐛𝐞𝐭𝐰𝐞𝐞𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐝𝐲𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐜𝐬 𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤 — 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐭𝐮𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬?” His perspective was simple — and revealing: "In student teams, goals are clear, but the structure is flexible. People are encouraged to explore, experiment, and naturally find roles that fit their character. At work, hierarchy and responsibilities are more defined — often shaped by experience rather than individual strengths.That structure brings clarity, but it can also make teams hesitant to bring new ideas forward. Adrian highlighted the value of freedom in teams — not as a lack of structure, but as space for ownership." A reminder to start the year with intention: structure creates order — but freedom creates voices. 💭 As we begin this year, where do you feel more comfortable sharing ideas — structured teams or flexible ones? #JustAThought #NewYearReflections #Leadership #TeamDynamics #PsychologicalSafety #SoftSkills #Agile #Scrum #Community

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🚀 NodeJS Meetup Berlin – Tomorrow! Final prep is underway for the NodeJS Meetup this Thursday the 22rd, and we’ve got a last-minute switch in the tech talk lineup! Over 180 devs have already registered with 30 in the waitlist, and the order to the pizza is about to be sent in! 🎤 Updated Talk Lineup: Talk One: From Zero to Observability with OpenTelemetry & Logfire/Pydantic By Ehsan Hosseini This talk will cover the core concepts of OpenTelemetry and observability. It will introduce Logfire and then demonstrate how it can make understanding and fixing applications faster and more enjoyable with a live demo. Talk Two: The Silent Developer’s Survival Guide By Anastasiia Kudriavtseva We all want good management, clear communication, and fair credit. But we don’t always get them. A guide for introverts and low-key folks who want to grow, be heard, and survive the review season. Visibility is a tool — not a personality trait. 🔄 Format Tweaks: As mentioned last time, we’re experimenting: 🍕 Food + drinks + networking will happen after the talks, so you can stay focused and then connect with fellow "noders" and speakers in a more relaxed vibe. 🎉 The event hit full capacity early — if you're on the waitlist, keep an eye out as spots do open up. It helps us plan for bigger rooms next time. Massive thanks to Contentful being such amazing hosts and supporting this community with space, food, and drinks. 📍See you tomorrow! #NodeJS #TypeScript #Observability #FullStack #OpenTelemetry #BerlinTech #OpenSource #Meetup #DeveloperCommunity #Hiring #Pydantic

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$2,407 USD/month is $12,884 per year… That’s almost double the federal minimum wage at 40 hrs/wk for 52 weeks (USD15,080), even in a region with high labor prices like the US. While it’s incredible that these tools are working, I cannot help but feel a lot of this spending is misguided. Especially for something like LLM tokens for development, for pre-made software like Claude Code? It’s not Capex, it’s Opex. If you are 1. spending so much on tokens that it would be competitive to simply hire an offshore developer 2. you aren’t developing any infrastructure beyond committing the generated tokens (using off-the-shelf software), and 3. aren’t using any capabilities unique to LLMs over humans, then: The value you are getting is largely an expensive learning experience, and you’re likely incurring significant unnecessary tech debt. Perhaps this is fine. Much more worryingly, if you are in the business of training base models which rely on this class of spending, you are living on borrowed time, facing an existential risk of getting outcompeted from below by cheaper models, especially open source. It's a fools errand to assume that you can train a huge model on Anna's Archive and the like, yet somehow slow down getting distilled. How long will investors be willing to put up jaw dropping sums of capital before seeing any return, all to risk being #2? I predict much more innovation in smaller, cheaper models, and I think it's far more likely that ternary models, distilling techniques, and stuff like RKWV will pay off. In fact, while writing this post, I found out that RKWV has *already* made it into Microsoft Office! I wouldn't want to be the one financing GPUs or RHLF for large models. While this should not be interpreted as a comment on other business going on at Apple, I should say that I largely agree with their assessment to stay out of the large base model race, for exactly this reason.

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AI becomes truly useful when it stops being a separate tool and starts improving existing workflows. A lot of AI innovation today adds new platforms, new interfaces and new handovers. This creates more complexity. What we are exploring at acolono GmbH goes in a different direction. We are embedding AI directly into Drupal to support media creation and editing where content work already happens → in your CMS. The impact is subtle, but important. Fewer system breaks. Shorter feedback loops. Clearer ownership of content and media. Decisions, execution and publication move closer together. It points toward a future where AI becomes part of digital infrastructure rather than an external experiment. We are working on a more intuitive UI already and what we are addressing next is transparency. Clear traceability of media changes, not only for editors, but also for regular site visitors, combined with proper revisions and versioning of media assets.

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This morning, we added something new to WP Umbrella: the full life cycle of a plugin. On top of our existing activity logs, you can now see the complete history of every action taken on a plugin, whether it happened inside WP Umbrella or directly in the WordPress dashboard. This include: update from WP Umbrella, update from WordPress backend, rollback, activation, deactivation, etc. 👉 Yes, that means you’ll know if a client updated a plugin on their own 😬 Because nothing’s worse than getting a call that “something broke” and having no idea what changed. Now you’ll always have the full story, so you can fix faster, reassure your clients, and sleep easier at night.

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Accidental quality. That's what I call the hidden trap in traditional example-based tests. In my recent talk at Techcamp Hamburg, I spoke about how enumerating test cases creates a dangerous illusion of safety, while the real bugs hide in the blindspots we never think to check. Property-based testing flips the narrative: it searches for bugs instead of just testing for them. If you have 1000 users and you are writing 50 handpicked test cases, are you sure you are not missing any particular use-case? https://lnkd.in/eTyjrPPi

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What can one developer build in three weeks? At the end of December, I suddenly had time. A lot of time. So I ran an experiment: let Claude Code off the leash and see where it takes me. I didn't expect it to take me to LinkedIn. 🙃 In three weeks, it wasn't just a product that emerged. It was an entire ecosystem: API Mapper (an extension for WordPress and Joomla), plus the complete infrastructure. Website. API system. Console dashboard. DevTools. Documentation. Marketing tools. 26 services working together. And here's the wildest part: there's a self-healing system built in. When bugs appear in customer environments, they get automatically detected, fixed, and shipped with the next release. An AI-powered autoloop that keeps improving itself. Here's the thing. In 30 years of working with websites, tech, and every layer in between, I always avoided code. Code was machine language. And I'm human. Now I have a tool that fills this last gap. And you can bet I'm pretty happy about it. For the first time, I can combine everything I've learned over the past decades with new technology and see where it takes me. The song in the video is "Three Weeks", a farewell to the old days when we still worked the traditional way. There's a certain irony in that. I'm grateful this door opened. I've accepted this new reality. 😄 Now I'm happy to talk about API Mapper (which is turning out really great 🚀) and WootsUp!? in general and about how to use AI tools in ways that actually move you forward. Not as a toy. As a partner. Welcome to my journey.

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CSS Advent Calendar - Day 9 – Container Queries Container Queries are the feature we missed for years. With them, components become truly independent – no longer oriented to the viewport, but to their own context. This fundamentally changes the architecture of frontends. Responsive design becomes more local, modular, and scalable. Container Queries are not just another feature. They are a turning point. #CSS-Advent-Calendar #CSS #Web-Development https://lnkd.in/e_dZU97d

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The new Cluecumber report library version 3.12.0 for Cucumber json reporting is out. This release brings updated dependencies, bug fixes and fresh new features for rerun test scenarios and exception display. https://lnkd.in/evr2-nZR

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Companies really should take "translatability" into account when developing their frontend. I've had a terrible experience using the browser's translation feature on most websites ever since I moved to Germany. This is especially due to the fact that companies here do not even bother to add support for the English language on their websites (which on its own is another topic to rant about). A messy shadow DOM cripples the translation, which results in a half‑broken translated page. Worse than that is when the translation breaks select inputs and options. I've definitely run into problems sending the wrong input to the backend because the browser translation broke the input data. It's absolutely unacceptable that in 2025 we have such complications with UI.

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🚀 Two days before WhatTheStack kicks off, I’m running a crash course in building apps that survive the real world. Real-World React: The Architectural Playbook for Performance, Resilience & Scalability is built around React and Next.js as our shared language, but it’s not exclusive. I’ve had Vue, Svelte, and Angular devs attend, and most of the concepts we’ll cover are framework-agnostic and apply to any modern frontend stack. We’ll dig into: - Architecture patterns that implicitly boost performance - The real story behind React reconciliation (and anti-patterns to avoid) - Resilience engineering for modern frontends - DORA metrics and delivery velocity at scale - Building post-deployment confidence so you can ship without fear This isn’t about pixel-perfect UIs, it’s about patterns, decisions, and trade-offs that keep apps fast, resilient, and scalable when they’re serving millions, not just running locally. 🎯 If you work in frontend and want to level up your architecture game, this is for you.

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if you think #Rust is still a niche programming language only for hobbiest, you need to catch up on the news. Ubuntu is replacing the `sudo` implementation with a Rust version. You cannot go more mainstream and security critical than this!

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