I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. Lean Startup literature make it sound as if customer development is hard work, but manageable. Well, even that is an understatement: even requesting customer interviews is hard! I spent the past month contacting 40 people by phone, email and LinkedIn. Here are the biggest issues I ran into and the biggest lessons I learned while doing customer development in the Netherlands, in a B2B context.

Passenger is not an easy project to debug. Being written in C++, it occasionally runs into failures caused by low-level issues. Such is the case with a strange bug report that we received last week. Users reported that Passenger crashes during startup on FreeBSD 11.2, but not on earlier FreeBSD versions. This blog post describes my debugging journey.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. But what do you do once you're in an interview? In this article I will discuss what to do and what to ask in order to get the most insights out of an interview session, as well as what sorts of things you should probe for.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and requesting customer interviews. But I was told my messages are too American. The ways Americans talk is too outgoing, flamboyant and over-the-top by Dutch and perhaps also German standards. It's probably also a bit too long. Seeing that my initial customer base will be based in the Netherlands, I will need to tone down and shorten my messages. Here's what I did.

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology and its customer discovery phase. In this blog post I will go deeper into the step about talking to customers. When searching within one's network for customers to interview, how do you ask your network for introductions?

I previously blogged about and summarized the Lean Startup methodology. In this blog post I will go deeper into its first phase, which is "customer discovery".

If you hang out in startup circles like I do, then you may have heard of the “Learn Startup” methodology. But what is it exactly? I’ve been researching Lean Startup and in this blog post I will summarize what I’ve learned, explain what new insights this research has given me, and talk about future research and blogging directions.

The development and deployment of modern apps is very different from how it used to be. Networked applications are now very common. Development at scale is now common: hundreds of developers working on a system, which may be split into many microservices. Deployment at scale is now also common: apps serving millions of users. Various practices emerged, or became popular, to deal with these new challenges. I've learned many practices over the past decade, but resources that describe these practices appear to be scattered. This post is an attempt to inventorize the various practices that are used for the development, deployment and management of modern apps.

Turns out running a company isn’t just about money, fame or even cool products and happy customers. We have a social responsibility towards our employees and society at large.

On 2018 May 25, Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will start being enforced. The GDPR defines strict rules on how personal data should be handled. But there is a lot of fear and controversy about the GDPR from people worldwide. With the controversial concepts, the compliance overhead and hefty multi-million fines, is it a good idea for non-EU companies to simply ban all EU visitors from accessing their websites?