ArnhemJUG

ArnhemJUG
After the summer break, we are excited to announce that we are welcomed by OpenValue Arnhem for the September meetup.

Agenda

• 17:00 CET walk-in
• 17:30 – 18:30 Food and drinks
• 18:30 – 19:30 talk: How to Survive and Thrive as a Dev (Team) in the Exponential Age of AI by Sander Hoogendoorn
• 19:30 – 19:45 break
• 19:45 – 20:45 talk: The Hexagonal Hangover by Ties van de Ven
• 20:45 – 21:30 drinks

How to Survive and Thrive as a Dev (Team) in the Exponential Age of AI
The AI revolution isn’t coming — it’s already altering how we architect products, ship features, and run engineering teams.

During this talk, in his signature charismatic style, Sander Hoogendoorn, CTO at iBOOD.com and a seasoned developer with over four decades of coding experience, doesn’t get stuck in theory or hype, but confronts the pressing issues head-on. You’ll get a no-fluff, grounded view from iBOOD — what we’re already doing with AI, how we built it into our systems, and how it shapes the way we work.

We will walk through some concrete examples, for instance, using the Responses API, adopting the Model Context Protocol (MCP), embedding AI into our e-commerce workflows, and automating genuine parts of our stack. You’ll see where AI accelerates, and where it fails us.

We won’t shy away from the dark side either — vendor lock-in, breaking prompts, model opacity, shifting APIs, and how fast dependency can become fragility. These are real risks that shape architectural and organizational decisions we make daily.

To survive exponential speed, we retired many practices: no Scrum, no rigid ceremonies, no big upfront plans, no pull requests or code reviews. Instead, we embrace working in fluid autonomous microteams, continuous learning, experimentation, and radical adaptability.

Expect an honest, fast-paced, and experience-driven session — mixing architecture, culture, and practical insight — on what it truly takes for developers and teams to survive and thrive in the age of AI.

About Sander Hoogendoorn
Sander Hoogendoorn is an independent dad, avid traveler, and lifelong software developer. Coding since 1978, he still ships code every day — because once a developer, always a developer.

Currently CTO at iBOOD, he has led technology at several companies over the past decade and was once Capgemini's global agile thought leader. But don't expect corporate buzzwords: Sander is known for cutting through the fluff with a post-agile mindset and a healthy disregard for outdated best practices.

He helps teams and organizations break the rules that need breaking — replacing heavyweight processes with lightweight thinking, and agile dogma with actual flow. If something's slowing your team down, chances are he's already ranted about it in a keynote.

Onstage, he brings code, stories, and sharp insights on disruption, continuous delivery, microservices, monads (yes, really), software architecture, and the lost art of writing beautiful code. Fast-paced, thought-provoking, and never just theory.

Sander believes in small steps, critical thinking, and building stuff that works. No silver bullets. Just better software, made by better teams.

The Hexagonal Hangover
“It depends.” It’s the classic software architect’s answer… but what does it actually depend on? Patterns like Clean and Hexagonal Architecture are great tools, but they are often applied dogmatically. When we automatically wrap simple features in endless layers of abstraction and domain interfaces, we introduce unnecessary distance between related concepts. Those extra layers are intended to decouple, but they can sometimes just make our code harder to navigate, test, and maintain. In this talk, we’ll take a step back from “best practices” and look at the trade-offs behind architectural choices. Using clear Java code samples, we will explore the metrics that help guide these decisions: coupling, cohesion, and distance. Instead of looking for universally “clean” solutions, we’ll discuss how to evaluate what makes sense for your specific context.

About Ties van de Ven
Ties is a software engineer with a passion for concepts, software engineering fundamentals and helping others. He combines these passions by doing public speaking, volunteer work for organisations like Devoxx4kids and codingcoach and working as a Software Quality Expert at Alliander.