This last 18 months has been quite a ride for me. I’ve been struggling with gender dysphoria (a debilitating sense of disconnect from the gender assigned to someone at birth) for decades, but it took me until not so long ago to realize what it was, and how it could be treated. Nothing has been the same since. Transitioning and the events leading up to it changed my life, and the experiences I had during my transition changed me as a person, and as a leader.

It’s hard for me to open up about this period in my life, not…

My purpose with this post it not to make a case about why you should become a developer (or if you should become one at all), I will do that another time. I’m here, because a lot of people have asked me how. One way of course would be to spend years at a university, but on one hand you would learn a lot of theory that you don’t really need for a first job and can learn later, on the other hand you would have to learn and practice the basics on your own anyways. …

Deep learning has been on the news for quite a while, and it has ushered in an era of innovation. We have seen incredible results in the field of computer vision, natural language processing, self-driving vehicles, robotics, and even game AIs. This new technology may seem like sorcery, but at its heart, it is a relatively simple concept. My goal with this article is to give you an intuitive understanding of what goes on under the hood, and what this amazing technology can do for you.

Machine intuition

Let’s start with an example. Suppose we would like to build a software that…

The engineering culture of a company might be the key to it’s success, yet as hyper growth kicks in it becomes hard to keep it while doubling the number of engineers every year. So the question becomes: is there a way to protect the culture, and if so, how?

Why did we start a bootcamp?

At Emarsys we take our engineering culture, habits and practices pretty seriously. The engineering office in Budapest (currently the main engineering office) started out as an extreme programming shop about 7 years ago. Over the years we have customized our processes and introduced continuous delivery into the mix.

Ever since its…

In a previous blog post I talked about the importance of being aware of the risks of software development. One of the points I made was that whenever software developers do anything worth their time and effort they are roaming on uncharted territories. Whatever has been done before is simply not worth doing ever again. Recognizing this is vital for innovation to thrive at a company, because when we boldly go where no man has gone before, uncertainty and chaos will be part of the game. …

For those of you who haven’t been following along, Lean Poker is a coding challenge where teams are developing simple poker playing bots. The catch is, that the bots start playing before people even started coding and keep playing all day long. The challenge is in delivering value quickly and continuously in small iterations so that your bot keeps staying ahead of other bots throughout the day. It’s an extremely intense day with lot of excitement and a chance to learn how to deliver value faster.

Long story short: if you got interested gather some friends (like 2 to 4…

Last Saturday we had the first ever Lean Poker Tournament, an event much like a code retreat, but with a slightly different format and purpose. A lean poker tournament’s aim is for participants to practice concepts related to lean start ups and continuous deployment. A poker team is a small group of developers (ideally 4 people forming 2 pairs) whose aim is to incrementally build a highly heuristic algorithm within a one day time frame that is just smart enough to beat the other robots. Professional poker robots are developed for years, so the purpose is definitely not to come…

Okay… let me rephrase that in a slightly less clickbaity manner: there are two fundamental problems with James Damore’s memo. One is a mistake in its reasoning that disqualifies it from being called science. The other is that the preconceptions of the author clearly clouded his judgement and that resulted in the aforementioned logical fallacy.

There are many more problems, but I’m just going to concentrate on these two to keep some focus and because I feel these are the most important points on which it should and can be objectively criticized. …