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
Database Auditing with EntityFramework and SQL Server
Keeping track of database changes in SQL Server with EntityFramework, let’s go over your options with sample implementations.
All code with some UnitTests can be found at the Github repository.
UnitTest: Check Security on your Controllers
Adding the [AllowAnonymous] or [Authorize("policy")] whenever a new Controller Action Method is added, it’s something that is easily forgotten.
… As I noticed when I was looking at some of our controllers 😵
Of course I have written this test many times before. These days it can be quickly re-created with AI but to avoid having to debug its code, here is the copy pasta version, with some possible variations.
![A comic book scene where a superhero (wearing a C# emblem) throws [Authorize] shields at rogue controller methods, cartoon villains named 'Anonymous Access' dodge them, bright bold colors, halftone patterns, comic panels with 'BOOM' and 'SECURED!' captions, playful and energetic, comic book art style](https://itenium.be/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/controller-security.png)
Book review: Joy of Agility: How to Solve Problems and Succeed Sooner
Introduction
In this book, Joshua Kerievsky tries to answer a key question: what does it actually look like to be agile, rather than merely do agile? This distinction immediately piqued my curiosity. Having worked as a software engineering consultant since 2010, I’ve witnessed the full spectrum of agile implementations, from the genuinely transformative to those where organisations cherry-picked the convenient bits. Kerievsky’s promise of a return to first principles through storytelling felt like precisely the perspective our industry needs.
Book review: Fundamentals of Software Engineering: From Coder to Engineer
I have just finished reading Fundamentals of Software Engineering: From Coder to Engineer, and it immediately took me back to my early days in the industry. I vividly recall that moment when I first joined a professional team: I knew how to write code, having learned the fundamentals in college, but I quickly discovered that being a software engineer involves a lot more than purely coding.
