Hey everybody. A few days ago a friend of mine asked me for advice about joining or not joining a startup. After I answered him, I got excited to share my condensed thoughts with you in this blog post. He asked me since I was very enthusiastic about founding my own startup. Back in the…
Author: Sören Hemken

5 Steps for Working with an Overachiever in Agile Teams
There is this one developer in your team. She knows the code best. Everyone knows her and everyone asks for her opinion, even if not team or code-related. She is in the same agile team as you, also for quite some time now and she saved the day more than once. In team discussions, she…

5 Essential Things about Working with a Product Owner
When a team has issues at communication with their Product Owner you may have serious trouble coming towards you. Having problems dealing and talking with your Product Owner inherits a lot of risks for everyone, e.g. it can lead to a huge mountain of technical debt, repeating release postponement, and ultimately a lot of stress,…

OpenCV & Tesseract: Android Computer Vision for Dummies
Introduction I got to know OpenCV as I investigated into computer vision solutions for a little startup called robodev GmbH (see here). There I developed possible ways for real-time object recognition and computation of angle and position of the recognized object. I fell in love with C++ and its possibilities to realize high-performance applications. Awhile…

Boostcamp in Berlin – A Field Report
Every season we are attending to a hackathon. This spring we went to one of the biggest in Germany, so they say, the Open Codes Hackathon in Karlsruhe. As one out of ~50 Teams we could choose one competition-category out of three: * Art & Technology, powered by ZKM * IT Brings People Together, powered…

How to start and learn coding
Every day we learn something new, people say,… and yet; you may end up in a situation you feel it’d only go further in one direction. You know there is so much outside of the box, and somehow you managed to get stuck inside. At least you don’t know how to get out anymore. That’s…