Software-Development on Tobi(as Mende)

AI Made Me 10x More Productive – Now What?

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Fri, 05 Dec 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Thoughts on AI, Productivity, and What We Should Do Differently

In the last couple of months, I got to use Claude code a lot for software development, and I am at a point with it, where it gives me consistently high-quality results at incredible speed. In 99.5% of all cases, I get the results that I expect/desire. In other areas of my life, (other) AI tools have a drastic influence on my productivity and (sometimes) even my ability to do certain things, too.

Building Diving Nomads in Public Part 3

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Building in Public – Part 3: How We built the Diving Nomads Partner Map

This is part three of the Building Diving Nomads in Public series.

After sharing how we automated outreach for dive centers and coliving / coworking partners, this chapter is about the thing people actually use – our Partner Map.

Building in Public: How Diving Nomads Automates Coliving & Coworking Partner Outreach

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 05:00:00 +0000

At Diving Nomads, we’re building something special for digital nomads who love scuba diving. Our mission is to make it easy for them to find great places to work, live, and dive — without having to choose between beautiful dive spots and solid remote work setups.

Building Diving Nomads in Public Part 1

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 05:00:00 +0000

Building Diving Nomads in Public: How We Onboard Dive Centers and Automate Memberships with (Almost) No Code

TL;DR
We’re building a platform for digital nomads with a passion for scuba diving. Our lean, automation-first tech stack allows us to move fast, deliver value early, and maybe inspire other early-stage founders to rethink how they build.

How to give outstanding code reviews (if you have to)

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 05:00:00 +0000

How to give outstanding code reviews (if you have to)

Most software companies use code reviews to ensure that at least two people check each part of the code base and maintain its quality. Although I prefer pair or team programming over asynchronous code reviews, I recognize that this isn’t always possible. In such cases, asynchronous code reviews are the next best option.

Things I love and hate about the state of software companies in 2024

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 16 Mar 2024 05:00:00 +0000

Things I love and hate about the state of software companies in 2024

Disclaimer: This started as a rant, not meant to be published. But sticking to my “New Year’s resolution” to write about what triggers me most, I decided to publish it anyway. I wanted to publish it as a LinkedIn post, but it got too long. So here is the unshortened, unpolished and authentic original version of this document, most of which I wrote on my phone after waking up on a Sunday at 5:45am. 😬

May the LLM be with You – On Planes and German Trains

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 30 Dec 2023 05:00:00 +0000

May the LLM be with You – On Planes and German Trains

This might be the unofficial seventh part of the “AI for DevEx” series. LLM tools are a great help during the entire software development process. But what if we are offline or if data privacy concerns disallow using ChatGPT and similar tools?

Managing Technical Debt in Software Development

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 29 Apr 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Managing Technical Debt in Software Development

Organizations often accumulate technical debt as the pressure to deliver customer value quickly increases, systems grow, and extending functionality the right way becomes more difficult.

Make three friends with one gift: Why developer experience is key to productivity, engineering excellence and stakeholder satisfaction.

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 11 Feb 2023 06:00:00 +0000

Make three friends with one gift: Why developer experience is key to productivity, engineering excellence and stakeholder satisfaction.

In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, software development has become a critical aspect of many organisations. However, with increased demands on development teams, it’s easy to overlook the importance of developer experience.

The Importance of Developer Productivity in a Recession

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 26 Nov 2022 13:30:00 +0000

The Importance of Developer Productivity in a Recession

When times get rough, companies and investors get more cautious with how they spend and invest their money. Many companies reduce their spending on employees and salaries by laying off large numbers of people.

How to do Architecture Mapping Workshops in a Remote Setup

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 13:27:00 +0000

How to do Architecture Mapping Workshops in a Remote Setup

Mapping the architecture of the system that you are building in your company, is a worthwhile activity. The worth does not come so much from the end-result, the map, but much more from the activity itself, if done right.

DRY – DO repeat yourself

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 30 Apr 2022 13:13:00 +0000

DRY – DO repeat yourself

When I started my career as a software developer and already during university, almost no principle was mentioned as often as the DRY principle: “Do not repeat yourself”

Code ownership conflicts as a signal for structural mismatch

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 19 Feb 2022 12:54:00 +0000

Code ownership conflicts as a signal for structural mismatch

In my last article, I explained why I believe that individual code ownership is bad and why weak code ownership on a cross-team level can be highly beneficial.

Code Ownership: Keeping the balance between structure and agility

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 12 Feb 2022 12:53:00 +0000

Code Ownership: Keeping the balance between structure and agility

Code ownership is an important topic when it comes to enabling your teams and allowing developers to improve the system while keeping the overhead of changes low.

A platform team for next-level developer experience

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 05 Feb 2022 12:49:00 +0000

A platform team for next-level developer experience

In this article, I am sharing my experience (and opinions) of how a platform team should be set up to provide great developer experience for other development teams.

OKRs are NOT guaranteed deliveries

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 22 Jan 2022 12:44:00 +0000

OKRs are NOT guaranteed deliveries

Objectives and key results are a great tool for collaborative goal-setting and for aligned on a company-wide direction. While the key objectives or north-stars might be handed down from C-level management, the concrete objectives and key-results are discovered by the teams. Only they know best, how to achieve the bigger goals of the company. Thus, all teams needs to figure out, how they can best contribute to the company goals.

There is no system like production: Why you should test in production

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 12:27:00 +0000

There is no system like production: Why you should test in production

Shipping software without testing sounds scary. And this is also, what this article is not about. Organisations spend a lot of time and money to make sure that code is as much error-free as possible, when it reaches production and affects users.

Adopting Continuous Delivery: More a culture change than automation of processes

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 04 Dec 2021 12:07:00 +0000

Adopting Continuous Delivery: More a culture change than automation of processes

Continuous delivery, the process of automatically delivering changes of a system without human interaction, is one of the most beneficial practices that software teams can adopt. In Accelerate, the authors Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble and Gene Kim, discovered a strong link between using continuous delivery and organisational performance: Teams that continuously deliver their changes have a stronger sense of ownership, get faster feedback and need to rework their code less. Furthermore, deployments are less stressful and the risk of burnout is reduced.

Crucial developer practices: Decoupling deployments and releases

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 12:02:00 +0000

Crucial developer practices: Decoupling deployments and releases

When systems are small and the risk of introducing defects when changing its behaviour is low, these changes can happen during deployment. However, when systems grow, the behaviour becomes more complex and more people are working on the system, it is essential to decouple behaviour changes, the releases, from deployments.

Do you have walls in your deployment process?

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 11:59:00 +0000

Do you have walls in your deployment process?

Enabling units to quickly deploy and release new features to their customers is one of the goals of cross-functional units and the “you build it, you run it” DevOps mentality.

Just care less about not being aligned

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Sat, 06 Nov 2021 10:12:00 +0000

Just care less about not being aligned

If you work in a company that is aiming for fast growth, being overly aligned will slow you down as the number of stakeholders increases. If every time I want to introduce a new linting rule I would need to agree with 55 other developers, I will likely not do it. Instead of forcing all units to use the same tech stack, the same code style, the same testing framework and so on, we need to learn to just care less. Of course, the ability to care less depends on the architecture and the company structure. In a monolithic application, it is far more difficult to reduce the impact of units on each other, than in an environment of properly structured microservices. Thus, the goal is to identify and create structures that allow you to care less about alignment. The entire idea of cross-functional units is aiming for units to be independent. This is achieved by having units own vertical slices of the system completely, which reduces the need for alignment with other units to a minimum. However, sometimes even cross-functional units can influence each other because of technical dependencies or suboptimal structuring of these units.

Cross-functional units and uni-functional teams

tobi@techunicorn.builders (Tobias Mende) — Fri, 29 Oct 2021 09:08:00 +0000

Cross-functional units and uni-functional teams

Many modern companies put a high emphasis on having multiple functions within one unit or team. The goal: The unit should be able to function with a high degree of autonomy, working on its area and owning everything in this area from beginning to end.