The past

If you are 20 years old or younger you probably don’t even know what the strange devices on the picture are used for. Those are telephones. Back in the days, if you wanted to order new clothes or raise a complaint about your hotel booking you needed to

• throw in coins (yes, coins! You carried a lot of them in your pocket back then)
• grab the handset (the strangely formed thing on the left at the end of the cord)
• dial the selector (the round thing at the top of the main device)
• talk to people (urgh!)

Today

How do you order clothes today? How do you raise complaints about your hotel booking or change the schedule of your stay? Of course — the internet. Everything happens over the internet. But still, you need to write emails and wait some days to get a response, right? …

“We have not documented that, we are working agile, you know.” — (2019, Person wants to remain unknown)

It’s not my intention to offend anyone, but I do want to share my experience from a recent project with you. Some of you may disagree and I’m definitely simplifying some aspects, but nonetheless, let me share my point of view.

• I do like agile software development methods.
• I don’t like companies & projects claiming to work agile, but actually not.
• I hate companies & projects claiming to work agile, but actually not and blaming agile methodologies in case of problems.

Take the above quote as an example. I was introduced as a consultant to a running project. A production incident was raised because a complete process got stuck and 130 service employees couldn't report any new cases. …

Which Tetris Block represents you?

Need to build a Team — Learn from Tetris

Unfortunately, new team members don’t fall from the sky like Tetris blocks.

Introduction

Building a competitive team is a little bit like playing Tetris. In Tetris, there are various blocks falling from the sky with different properties. You need to combine them and use them in the best way as per their properties to win the level.

Unfortunately, in the real world, new team members don’t fall from the sky like Tetris blocks. But the challenge in building competitive teams is similar. …

There is a war outside. Since the late 1970s, McDonald’s and Burger King are fighting over market share and customer attraction in the so-called Burger wars.

I don’t like fast food, but I was curious about the amount and distribution of fast-food restaurants. Wherever you travel in the world — for sure you will find a McDonald’s or Burger King, or both. How many restaurants are there actually and how are they distributed?

I will take you on a journey and visualize the distribution of McDonald’s and Burger King restaurants in the three European capitals London, Paris, and Berlin. …

Preparation & Introduction

Picture yourself coordinating a team of Superheroes. It’s your job to assign one Superhero to a recent nearby crime case. How could you do this? Well, first you need to locate which Superhero is closest to the criminal case. So let’s put their current location on a Map. And that’s exactly what we will do now with Python Folium.

The Folium library combines the Data wrangling powers of Python and the visualization strengths of Leaflet.JS. We can play with the data in Python, and then visualize it in on a Leaflet map with Folium.

Before we jump right into the project, let’s prepare and install Folium with the commandpip install foliumor conda install folim -c conda-forgeif you use conda. …

You all now this colleague from work — the integration auntie or integration uncle. He/she will out rule everyone else when it comes to the integration of applications, systems, or devices and has some great skills like…

• Great knowledge about integration patterns like Messaging, Event-Driven Integration, Request/Response, Pub/Sub, or whatever you choose.
• Deep insights into integration protocols (HTTP, MQTT, FTP, SOAP, etc), data-interchange formats (XML, JSON, CSV, etc), and data types (Integer, String, Boolean, Array, etc).
• Knows at least two different programming languages by heart in every detail and can tell you everything about firewalls, proxies, and networking.

For sure the integration expert is your choice and primary contact if you want to implement a new integration between two applications, but there is a problem. The integration expert likewise has the following characteristics. …

Let me tell you a story of a wonderful Marketing Experience that I have witnessed recently.

Spoiler alert: it was delicious!

Over the weekend we went on a short camping trip with my VW Bus to Zandvoort in the Netherlands. On Saturday evening we booked a table in a restaurant directly at the beach (will drop the name in exchange for claps ;-)).

The restaurant itself was a good experience already. The staff was as friendly as attentive and relaxed at the same time. The atmosphere was comfortable and the food was tasty. It was a restaurant of great quality but at the same time relaxing and cozy — not like a 5-star restaurant were you worry which silverware to use for which course. …

What’s currently trending? And where?

You know what’s currently trending? And where in the world? Well, I don’t… but Twitter does.

In 2019 Twitter had 330 million users from which 145 million were active daily. 500 million tweets were submitted per day which makes 5.787 tweets a second (source). That’s a hell of data. How amazing would it be to visualize the Tweets on a map in real-time to see what is trending and where? I will show you how!