Yoink: Fancy Claude Code Notification Hooks
While working on the next itenium AI session “Extending Your Harness”, I was working on the slides of the plugin primitives and hooks are definitely a very important one. You don’t ask the model nicely to run the tests or to adhere to your linting conventions and pray that it actually does…
No! For that kind of backpressure you want to be fully deterministic – with hooks!
Book review: Software Security for Developers
Reading Manning’s Software Security for Developers offered a refreshing break from the usual hand-waving around security principles. The book is grounded in practical reality, honest about what works in production, straightforward about common pitfalls, and careful about those implementation details that trip up even experienced teams.
Microsoft Build 2026: AI Becomes Core Infrastructure for Everyday Development
Microsoft Build 2026: Microsoft’s Clearest Sign Yet That AI is Becoming Part of Everyday Development
Microsoft Build 2026 took place from June 2 to 3 in San Francisco, with Microsoft using the event to set out a clear direction for the next phase of its platform strategy.
The message was straightforward: AI is no longer being positioned as an optional add-on.
It is becoming part of the infrastructure of how Microsoft expects developers to build, test, and run software.
Book review: Essential GraphRAG
Reading Manning’s Essential GraphRAG (free download) was a welcome shift from the usual GenAI discourse.
It’s founded in reality, it’s honest about what works, forthcoming about what doesn’t, and attentive to those uncomfortable implementation details that regularly derail even the best-laid plans.
The itenium Slack Meme Bot® : with Claude Code?
Three years ago I tried to get ChatGPT to rebuild the itenium Slack Meme Bot and gave up halfway through because the LLM just wasn’t up for the task.
This week I asked Claude Code. A brainstorm with a few clarifying questions, a quick spec, a few prompts to match my infrastructure, and the resulting code worked on my first test.
Meridian: A Scroll-Driven Memory Timeline
The day before her birthday, I was talking about the awesomeness that is Scout and she asked if I could set up a Scout/Atlas for her as well. And then she remarked that I’d better never give her an app as a gift.
Google I/O 2026: The Agentic Era
Google I/O 2026 has concluded. The central theme from Sundar Pichai was the transition into the “Agentic Era”. There was a significant number of announcements, ranging from Gemini 3.5 Flash to new OS integrations in Android 17.
It is always helpful to look past the initial promotional framing to see how these tools fit into production environments. The industry is moving beyond standard chatbots towards agents that handle multi-step tasks. To understand what this means for daily software engineering, we need to look at the practical implications of these announcements on our development workflows.
Scout: A Self-Hosted Deep-Research Agent on Claude Code
Every year the same problem… what to buy for her birthday. While standing in line at the bakery, I started a GitHub Issue. By the time I got back to my desk, a fancy html overview was published to my GitHub Pages with a fallback to the dry markdown research. In there was the gem “Hunt A Killer: a six-month serialized murder-mystery”!
A Decade of itenium Slides, Reborn in Slidev
For ten years our presentations have lived in PowerPoint. Decks for internal sessions, the architecture track, the frontend track – all in .pptx, all locked behind MS Office, all painful to diff, review, or evolve.
I’ve wanted to migrate them to “something” for years. But I never got around to it, because who has time for that? Claude got me past the activation barrier and I’m never looking back.
Takeaways from the Java One 2026 Ask the Architect Session
Introduction
Recently, I had the opportunity to watch the Ask the Architect panel from Java One 2026. Featuring senior figures such as Brian Goetz and John Rose, it provided a candid look into the Java ecosystem’s trajectory.
Vibe Coding the SkillForge
The skill matrix at itenium is currently an Excel file.
For an IT consultancy, this is obviously unacceptable. The cobbler’s children have no shoes, the mechanic drives a rust bucket, and the IT consultancy tracks skills in a spreadsheet.
Enter SkillForge: our custom app where we “forge our skills.”
Empower your team with continuous learning. Track progress, manage courses, and build skills together.
– CEO Steven Robijns, moments before authorizing $1200 in AI token spend
