Simon Schrottner

It has been quiet around me for a while.

Herodotus wrote of a bird that lived five hundred years in Arabia, and when its life came to an end, it did not wait to be surprised by death.

A hearth fire required no priest, no temple, no calendar date.

Pausanias, walking through Athens centuries after the Boule had done its daily work, recorded something easy to miss.

The Boule was a council of five hundred, fifty chosen from each of ten tribes.

Before a young Athenian took his full place in the city, he spent two years in the ephebeia.

Metron was the Greek word for a measure: the standard you judge a thing against.

Mimesis was the Greek word for imitation, and the oldest theory of how we learn: by copying a thing long before we understand it.

WeAreDevelopers World Congress has happened.

The kybernetes was the helmsman who steered a Greek ship, reading the wind and working the steering-oar to hold a course.

To be on the hook is to be the one who answers when something breaks.

The most important step in the old process was never written down: the confused developer getting up, walking across the room, and asking.

In an ancient Greek household, the oikonomos was the steward: the one trusted to manage the estate’s resources so the whole household prospered.

My previous role was something special.

An astrolabe doesn’t map every star.

A trireme was the warship that made Athens a power in the Mediterranean, not for its size, but for its structure.

Every engineer learns it early.

The Athenian agora wasn’t a building.

The Library of Alexandria was the ancient world’s greatest repository of knowledge.

In folklore, a genie grants wishes without judgment.

I noticed something a few months ago: I was talking to my colleagues less.

When I wrote about shifting the engineering process left (spec sessions, autonomous agents, humans reviewing output rather than writing code), a question kept coming up.

“A fool with a tool is still a fool.” — often attributed to Grady Booch I keep coming back to this quote when I watch teams adopt AI.

Every company I talk to wants AI in their development process right now.

This blog started as a place to collect ideas.

The current situation is odd, and I am not sure how to tackle it.

We instrument everything and hope something useful comes out.

Observability tooling was built for humans.

There is a lot of conversation happening right now about agentic systems.

In our first post we learned how we can extract our build into an own centralized file.

My company is currently migrating to GitLab and also to GitLab CI.

I released version 0.3.0 due to some interesting bugs and some misconceptions.

My biggest problem with my Blog is my bad writing.

My work on the Gradle Repositories Plugin is progressing quite fast.