Arjan Assink
Engineering leader in Leiden.
I like small teams that ship, and problems where the software is the means rather than the point. Fifteen years in: eight of them in payments, a few in logistics and e-commerce, the last ones running engineering for a hospitality software group. I still write code, in my own time.
How I think
Less but better. Smaller teams of experienced people go faster than big ones, and AI is widening that gap. The cost of a mismatch goes up with it, so I hire slowly and preferably through people I know.
Shorten the feedback loop. It is the one goal I give an engineering team. Everything else — CI/CD, tests, tooling — is a way to get there. Process is what you add once the loop is already short and you want to keep it that way.
Bring the team along. When I introduced AI tooling to an established team, what worked was not a mandate. It was getting the first movers to show what they had built and letting the rest catch up at their own speed. Same for two teams that had never worked together: align where you must, leave room everywhere else.
Build for the person holding the phone. The best software I have worked on was for people who did not care about software: drivers on a route, planners at six in the morning. What you show them, and what you leave out, matters more than what is under it.
On the side
I keep a few small things on GitHub. The one I am spending time on is DuoLexie, a reading-practice app for Dutch children with dyslexia. Early days, and it shows — but it is real, it is used, and it keeps my hands in the code.