Fearless Organizations on Dr. Raphael A. Bauer, MBA | Fractional & Interim CTO | PE/VC Tech Strategy & Due Diligence | Berlin | London | Austin, Texas

Table Of Contents TL;DR From AI-Newsfeed to The Prosperitist What The Prosperitist is The pipeline Step 1: ideas (the editor) Step 2: the skill does the heavy lifting Step 3: the editor again Efficiency gain 1: research and writing Efficiency gain 2: layo…

Table Of Contents TL;DR My journey in mobile tariff land - chasing a cheaper tariff What “saving money” actually got me Churning back But there’s a bigger lesson - especially for software product Takeaway More TL;DR good, reliable software wins, you can c…

Table Of Contents TL;DR The problem: you are the worst possible judge of your own conflict The hack: make the LLM the independent judge The open question is the whole trick Then bring it into the 1:1 For confidential threads: use a local model Why this wo…

Table Of Contents Intro to LaJolla The basic idea, and how it actually works Modernizing LaJolla with Claude Then: hundreds of machines.

Table Of Contents TL;DR The first “wow”, two years ago Two years later, the game changed Know your models LM Studio is your friend Two settings that save you a lot of pain 1.

Table Of Contents TL;DR Two kinds of “wow” What an agent actually is How Klaus Code does it The loop The one trick that makes it work Teaching the model the rules Tools are just an interface The details that turn a demo into something usable Why bother bu…

Table Of Contents TL;DR Intro Level 1: The Organization - Automate Your Company Level 2: The Teams - Agents at Work, Standards at Scale Level 3: The Product - New Use Cases for Your Customers Playing All Three Levels Closing Thought TL;DR AI transformation

Table Of Contents Introduction 1.

A few days ago I had a silly idea: what if my homepage had a hidden arcade game?

Table Of Contents TL;DR The Default Template The Four at a Glance Jobs and Gates Jobs and Musk So Whose Style Should You Copy?

Table Of Contents TL;DR Intro 1.

Table Of Contents Introduction The Migration That Changed My Thinking What AI-Accelerated Engineering Actually Looks Like Agentic Coding with Guardrails Automated Test Generation PR Automation and Code Review Release Automation What Leadership Needs to Do…

Table Of Contents TL;DR Intro The Core Tension How to Tell You’ve Drifted Too Far What Happens If You Don’t Course-Correct The Solution Is Simple (But Hard) A Framework for Getting Back on Track Classify every request Reframe revenue concentration Negotia…

When to Use a Performance Improvement Plan You have that feeling.

Table Of Contents Introduction What Tech Due Diligence Actually Covers 1.

Intro About two years ago I wrote about how AI will replace programming.

This post shows how NinjaX became a dependency-free 96KB Java web framework core (routing, sessions, rendering).

Intro There’s a persistent belief in the Java community that com.sun.net.httpserver.HttpServer is some kind of “internal JDK thing” you shouldn’t touch.

Intro Java and Java Web development Back in 2012 Java web development in 2012 was a very different world from what most teams are used to today.

Table Of Contents Why Tech Debt Kills Your Company #1 You Lose Your Ability to Hire and Keep Good Engineers #2 Security and Compliance Become Unmanageable #3 Delivery Speed Falls Off a Cliff #4 Upgrades Turn Into Existential, Company‑Level Projects Conclu…

Intro Diamonds are forever.

How to Make Tech Hiring Predictable, Measurable, and Boringly Reliable Hiring in tech is one of the highest-leverage activities in a company.

Intro Have you ever wondered whether that new tool your team built should be capitalized or simply expensed?

Intro Understanding capitalizable work is not just for finance professionals - it’s a critical part of building a sustainable and successful technology organization.

Intro Negotiating is one of the most underrated and under-taught skills.

Intro When I started writing tests, I mostly focused on pure unit tests and followed what’s commonly known as the testing pyramid.

Intro Story points are a often used by agile teams - but in my experience, they’re often misunderstood or misused.

The Problem With QA In many companies there’s a big confusion about the role of the product manager and the role of QA.

Table Of Contents That Vague Feeling that Engineering is Too Slow Software Engineering Sucks and Is Unpredictable A Better Way to Know What Is Going on in Your Dev Department Two Buckets Bucket “Keeping the Lights On” Bucket “Elective” What Percentages to…

Intro Some years ago, I moved to Potsdam, a crazy cool and nice city.

Intro AI will make software developers unemployed.

Intro In a recent tweetstorm Martin Tobias, a pre-seed venture capitalist at delphi.ai, shared his expert insights on the best strategies for early-stage B2B startups.

Intro The roles of Interim CTO and Fractional CTO often look similar at first glance.

Introduction Text-to-text, text-to-image, text-to-video.

Intro There are three principal ways if you want to want to have an llm with custom responses and operating on custom (maybe private and confidential) data.

Intro As part of my assignments as tech advisor and Fractional CTO I have to evaluate technology stacks and advise on tech strategy.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) offers a great way to provide data to Large Language Models (LLMs) and generate responses based on your own content.

Intro Respecting user privacy has always been important.

Intro Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a powerful technique to supply data to a Large Language Model (LLM) and generate accurate responses based on your own content.

The challenge Recently, I’ve been deeply involved in tech diligence and strategy projects, which are all about quickly accessing the right information.

What is a Good API?

Toyota Production System and Software Development In software development, efficiency and effectiveness are crucial for maintaining competitiveness and innovation.

Knowing what to build, when and how is a key success factor for any tech team.

Security within development teams is not just a priority but a necessity.

Note: There are many different names for “brown bag sessions” - some call them “lunch and learns”, “learn at lunch”, “working lunch” and more.

Intro A two-pizza team is a small, cross-functional group dedicated to supporting a specific business capability.

Implementing Career Ladders: A Simple and Straightforward Approach In my book on tech management, one topic that always garners attention is “career ladders.”

A Simple Way to Visualizing Software Architecture Effectively communicating the structure and design of a system is crucial.

Amazon’s Planning Cycles: A Guide for Leaders As CTO and Interim CTO, I am always looking for ways to optimize your company’s planning and execution processes.

Intro I recently read “Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon” by authors Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.