Arjan Franzen

Eight hours down in a single afternoon, 48 major outages in a year, and the largest cause is capacity. On GitHub becoming a Microsoft division, the reverse Midas touch, Bitbucket as the warning, and why we want both of them to stay healthy.

I have been running several AI agents side by side for months. After five hours of DHH on programming with agents, my tooling turned out to be right — what was missing were three habits, and none of them can be installed.

The creator of Ruby on Rails no longer writes a line of code himself and drives sixteen agents at once. Five hours with Lex Fridman, summarised chapter by chapter with timecodes — including the one number in the episode a buyer can actually use.

A developer with twenty years' experience stopped coding with AI — not because it failed, but because it worked too well. His diagnosis is sharper than most of what the vendors are selling. We just reach a different conclusion: not less AI, but better engineering around it.

Your CI dashboard shows how long a build takes, not how long it waited for the review before it. Agile Analytics exposes the delay nobody measures — and half an hour of waiting per engineer per day already costs around €5,000 a year.

The phone rings outside office hours, during an incident, or exactly when everyone is in a meeting. Zenthropic puts an AI agent against that: it picks up 24/7, asks the right questions and records what was agreed.

On Joe Rogan, Marc Andreessen describes a new kind of programmer: one who stops sleeping because twenty agents are waiting on an answer. He calls them AI vampires, and he files them under good news. The observation is right. The filing is not.

The moment you attach a coding agent to your codebase, you touch three regulatory regimes at once. Not because AI is separately regulated, but because it touches existing rules in places your delivery pipeline never had to think about before.

Application code that is wrong usually breaks. Infrastructure code that is wrong works — and that is exactly the problem. An agent writing Terraform hands you something that plans, applies and runs. Whether it is safe is not visible in the output.

Half an hour a day. It sounds like nothing. But work it through and it is €5,000 per engineer per year, or half a million euros across a hundred engineers — money that appears on no line of your P&L and that nobody ever approved.

Your DORA dashboard still shows the same four numbers. They no longer mean the same thing. Once a serious share of your code is not written by hand, what each metric tells you shifts — and the naive reading points in exactly the wrong direction.

From their own data centre to AWS, with Kubernetes as the foundation. Between September 2024 and April 2026, ZEN Software guided ANWB through the migration and the shift to cloud-native services. A business-critical enterprise service bus has been running in AWS since December 2025.

OTM 5.8 shipped on 13 March 2026. Its most striking change deprecates a field that 5.4 had only just added: one fuel per vehicle turns out not to work once your fleet goes hybrid.

Keana bundles transport orders per hub into trips with time windows and stops, so fewer vehicles have to enter the city centre. The product belongs to our client; the engineering team around it is us — support, maintenance and development, in full.

Every few years, a new language earns a permanent place in your toolkit. Not because it’s fashionable. Not because the internet says you should. But because, at some point, you realise: “This actually solves problems I already have — even if it annoys me first.” This Christmas, Rust joined that list for me.

When Donald Trump recently claimed: “Europe doesn’t buy anything American, not even cars,” he skipped an important truth. Europe does buy a lot from America — not in factories and hardware, but in digital services.

Cloud storage, streaming platforms, and SaaS subscriptions: almost all of them come from the US.

Europe consumes these services every single day, pouring billions of euros into the US economy. The money flows upward, into the cloud — and the cloud is firmly anchored on the American side.

A month after their first release, the OTM .NET packages jumped from 1.1.1.x to 5.7.1.1. Not a semver accident but a deliberate choice: from now on the library's version number tells you which version of the standard it speaks.

Eight days after the .NET packages came the Java side: on 9 July 2025 org.opentripmodel:otm-toolkit landed on Maven Central. One artifact instead of three packages, and one prerequisite you need to know before you put it in a plan.

Summer 2025 Poolside reading: must-read books about working in game development

For eight years OTM was a specification you had to retype yourself. On 1 July 2025 OpenTripModel.Model appeared on NuGet, and for the first time there is an official .NET implementation of the standard — including validation against profiles.

After eighteen months without a release, OTM 5.7 shipped on 23 May 2025. Its main change touches something nearly every OTM integration suffered from: a company's chamber of commerce number lived in a field called 'contact details', and that is not a contact detail.

Everyone talks about the cloud as if it were some magical place. But peel back the layers, and you'll find something very real — a stack of software. Not just any software, though. The cloud is a stack of scheduling software disguised as a platform.

Every integration between a shipper and a carrier starts with the same work: writing out the data model again. We built two open source libraries for OpenTripModel 5.6 from scratch — one in Java, one in .NET — so that work only has to be done once.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI are leading a revolution that will obsolete traditional SEO practices like content stuffing and link building. Let’s explore how these advancements transform SEO and what this means for your digital strategy.

In an era when regulations become stricter and communication data becomes increasingly crucial, your business needs more than a call recording tool—it needs intelligent voice governance. That’s where ZEN CyberCloud Voice Analytics comes in.

What went wrong? Microsoft owns both LinkedIn and Azure. 🤷‍♂️

Alkmaar, November 2023 — ZEN Software, a leader in innovative web solutions, proudly announces its latest success with Filogic, a forward-thinking company and owner of OpenTMS, A full-service transport management SaaS.

Today, I’d like to plea that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the missing piece of the productivity puzzle, revolutionizing industries and reshaping our work. While concerns have been raised about the potential risk of job displacement, it is essential to recognize that the benefits of Generative AI far outweigh this apprehension.

Hackathons have become the breeding grounds for groundbreaking ideas and solutions. The recent Praxis/Brico Hackathon, held on the 28th and 29th of September 2023, was no exception. Focusing on the convergence of Google Cloud, Retail, E-commerce, and ML/AI, this event showcased the immense potential of these technologies when harnessed together.

OTM 5.6 shipped on 17 November 2023. It is the release where you can see the standard is no longer used by carriers alone: school zones, weekly markets and roadworks called for recurring time windows — and for the difference between a hard requirement and a preference.

Two weeks after HashiCorp altered the licensing terms for its Terraform software, users, including corporate competitors, have created a fork of the Terraform code. HashiCorp changed its license from Mozilla Public License (MPL) to Business Source License v1.1 (BSL).

In a fierce social media showdown, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, delivered a mighty kick to ‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk. The battle started with numbers. Just five days after the launch, Zuckerberg proudly announced that Threads, essentially a Twitter clone, already had 100 million users.

In a shocking revelation that has sent shockwaves through the WordPress community, All-In-One Security (AIOS), a widely used WordPress security plugin installed on over 1 million websites, has been caught red-handed logging plaintext passwords and storing them in an accessible database.

Setting up and operating a Kubernetes cluster is becoming increasingly complex. Simply running a website using a hand full of Docker containers should not be difficult to set up and operate.

WordPress empowers businesses, creative enthusiasts, and content creators with its user-friendly interface and extensive customisation options. However, manually labeling images has been a frustrating aspect of working with WordPress. Fortunately, ZEN Software's revolutionary plugin eliminates this painstaking task.

Innovations such as ChatGPT and AI have begun transforming industries, enhancing productivity, and reshaping our work. However, it is common for some employers to resist change, as seen in the recent consideration of banning ChatGPT in certain workplaces.

The term "yak shaving" in programming originated from an episode of the popular 1990s cartoon "Ren & Stimpy." The episode titled "Stimpy's Invention" features a scene where Ren asks Stimpy to shave a yak, but in order to do that, Stimpy needs a special razor, which requires a special blade, which needs to be sharpened with a special stone, and so on.

My reason for being in the software industry has always been games; from an early age, I played games on my XT-PC, Gameboy, 386 DX, Pentium (Cyrix), Voodoo 3d card and later consoles (Playstation). I dreamed of working at a game studio or in Silicon Valley.

The European Union (EU) has approved landmark cryptocurrency regulations that will hold crypto exchanges responsible for customer losses. The rules, set to take effect in 2024 across the 27 EU member states, aim to protect investors and prevent money laundering and terrorist financing.

A leaked document from an anonymous Google employee has sparked discussions about the impact of open-source AI projects on industry giants like Google and OpenAI. While the document represents a single opinion within Google and may not influence the company's business strategy, it provides insight into the internal discussions surrounding open-source AI.

As software development becomes more complex, the need for testing grows. Testing is an integral part of the software development lifecycle, and it is essential for ensuring the reliability, functionality, and quality of the software being developed. There are several types of testing that software developers use, but two of the most common are unit testing and integration testing.

The strangler pattern is a technique from Dave Farley’s ‘Continuous Delivery’ for transforming a monolithic software system into a microservices-based architecture. It involves gradually replacing parts of a big monolithic software system with smaller microservices, thus "strangling" the monolith over time until it is completely replaced. The name ‘strangler pattern’ is derived from the strangler vine that grows on another tree, using it as physical support, while also stealing sunlight and nutrients from it, which eventually kills the host plant.

I was debugging a piece of code that threw a Java.lang.OutOfMemoryError. After a short investigation, I spotted that the SQL query the coded executed did not contain a ‘WHERE’ clause causing a nearly full download of a large table, making the process run out of memory.

Since the launch of chatGPT, it’s been DEFCON 1 at Google HQ. ChatGPT could easily lead to a golden-egg-laying-goose killer for Google: Google’s Search Ads business. Basically, Google has been printing money since their invention of Google Search Ads, and their top-dog position has been unchallenged for ever so long; this may all change now.

ZEN Software Tech Consultancy was crucial in Rabobank’s Cloud Transformation implementation. As a trusted partner, ZEN collaborated closely with Rabobank's Security Architecture Board to ensure the continuous improvement and protection of the Public Cloud's security. Together, we co-created Rabobank's Cloud Transformation Strategy, with a strong emphasis on the policy of prioritising SaaS over PaaS over IaaS.

OTM 5.5 shipped on 7 February 2023 and is the first release where the standard deliberately took something back instead of adding to it. Four separate constraints were replaced by one — while modelling low-emission zones and road closures finally became possible.

With the rise of remote work, remote coding job interviews have become increasingly popular. However, this shift has brought new challenges. Particularly concerning are the new possibilities for cheating and fakery during the interview process.

In recent years, the security of WordPress has come under scrutiny due to several high-profile vulnerabilities and attacks. In a recent attack, at least 30 WordPress plugins were infected, causing more than 1000 sites to be vulnerable. These security flaws have caused many businesses and organizations to consider migrating away from WordPress and towards more scalable and secure solutions like ReactJS hosted on Google Cloud.

With Big Tech becoming just a bit less Big these weeks: Facebook firing 10k employees, Twitter halving its workforce on Twitter HQ and Google is likely to follow.

The question of the moment is: “how do you determine engineers to let go?”. At Twitter HQ, the answer appears to have been lines of code. 😳

Thoughtworks is a publicly owned, global technology company with 49 offices in 18 countries and around 10.000 employees. It provides software tools and consulting services. The Thoughtworks Technology Radar is a document that sets out the changes that the company thinks are currently interesting in software development.

The “air-cooled” Azure data centre in Wieringermeer, the Netherlands (Azure region “West Europe”) absorbed a whopping 84 million litres of drinking water last year. That is much more than Microsoft’s stated consumption of 12 to 20 million litres in June last year.

The founder and driving force behind Uber is Travis Kalanick. Travis never outgrew the frat-boy phase but starts a company nonetheless. He ensures to be at the helm whatever happens. This fear is a legacy from the company before Uber, where he was successfully screwed over and ousted by a Hollywood investor.

On 9 May 2022 eleven change requests closed and OTM 5.4 was done. Its most important addition is one you only appreciate years later: from this version on you can record fuel consumption and emissions inside the standard itself, attached to the trip they belong to.

When releasing Agile Analytics we struggled linking Google Ads to Google Analytics v4 to our fine ReactJS site. Here is a small step-by-step guide on how to achieve this:

1. Connect your Google Ads to your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) account
2. Connect your Google Ads account to your website
3. Add and set up Google Ads conversions

In our examples we will connect Google Ads to our Next.js website in vanilla way (without any additional plugins). Please note that we have GA4 account already connected.

WordPress has been our Content Management System (CMS) since forever at ZEN Software. Why would we ever change a winning combination? We started to reconsider our position on WordPress after the founding and discontinuation of WaveScale in 2021.

An estimated 400 Atlassian customers have had access cut for up to a week in an ongoing problem the company has blamed on a maintenance script.

The incident first occurred around April 5, with the company acknowledging the problem on Twitter two days later.

Several cloud services have now been down for a week for those customers, meaning they’ve lost access to Jira Software, Jira Work Management, Jira Service Management, Confluence, Opsgenie Cloud, Statuspage, and Atlassian Access.

Is there a difference?

While it looks like the terms are identical, at ZEN Software we make a distinction between the two terms. Googling for ‘Cloud Native’ returns the same result as for ‘Native Cloud’. Let’s just imagine that Google cares more about keywords than keyword order. Even so: there is a difference when using the words in a specific order.

Let’s see

A copy constructor is a special type of constructor in object-oriented languages like C++ and Java that creates a new object by initializing it with an existing object. The copy constructor is used to create a copy of an object in a way that is independent of the original object, meaning that changes made to the copy do not affect the original.

If you forget to implement a copy constructor and use the default constructor provided by the programming language, the copy constructor will perform a shallow copy.

For Google Recertification assignment nr 1 is to scan your workplace to see if there are any hidden devices that could influence the exam.

All was fine and the exam was a PASS! I’ll be a certified Solution Architect for another 2 years.

'Decommissioning legacy systems is an art'. a wise architect once told me. He was right.

We’re happy and proud that the #Maxeda Team (in the picture) finished what we started 'back in the day'. We planned to remove the legacy system 1 year go-live of the new platform but it did not take 'only 1 year' like I predicted.. much longer indeed 😇

For hosting the ZEN Gathering in Alkmaar, Zoia & Dasha presented me with a classic Cossack shirt.

Дуже дякую!

Move 7 meters, get 20 square meters more office space.

With Dreamlab moving offices to Pieter Zeemanstraat 13A in Alkmaar. Their offices were available to us. so we moved shop from Oosterweezenstraat 6G to Oosterweezenstraat 6E, a whole 7 meters.

We gained 20 square meters so are now able to comfortably provide 5 desks and a bigger corner for demo and standups

Lucky for us I managed to get a paint cover in under 5 minutes from the shops across the street before ‘the pouring' 🙂 preventing worse….

The construction upstairs reached the concrete stage…. glad it is over now and the rain stopped.

In September 2020 Bulent Yokus, Wout Smelt and Arjan Franzen started talks to disrupt the VPS-dominated hosting market by leveraging Cloud infrastructure. This way we should be able to provide a highly scalable alternative to server-oriented based e-commerce hosting.

We founded WaveScale and set out to develop the WaveScale platform and start the WaveScale Portal. We recruited the team in the winter of 2020/21 and onboarded the first customer on the platform in mid-2021. The portal development had trouble getting off the ground and we struggled to get the base load standardised.

With the first wave of COVID-19 behind us and offices still not completely available we decided to meet in person, at 1,5 mtr distance for a strategy workshop with OKR as theme.

The session was very engaging, we set new goals and plotted a course for the months to come.

Maxeda's Digital Online department, responsible for the e-commerce platforms of Praxis and Brico, embarked on an exciting journey to enhance their online presence. ZEN Software Tech Consultancy played a pivotal role in this transformation, bringing their expertise and innovative solutions to help Praxis deliver an upgraded and improved e-commerce platform. Let's delve into the significant contributions made by ZEN Software Tech Consultancy during this journey.

ZEN Software Tech Consultancy has impacted Crunchr, a scale-up with 20 engineers developing an HR tech solution. With the guidance of ZEN's Agile Coach, Crunchr transformed its software development approach, resulting in improved efficiency, collaboration, and motivation.

On 7 November 2019 the Maxeda DIY Digital management (NL/BE) team set off to Brussels because Erik Cuypers was nominated CDO of the year 2019 in Belgium. We were confident he’d win the prize and were not disappointed. Erik won the award for CDO of the Year 2019! Since this is Belgium, there are 2 awards for CDO of the year:

• Dutch speaking CDO of the year and
• French speaking CDO of the year.

Erik won the Dutch speaking CDO of the year award. 🥳 well deserved Erik!

As part of the Data Science trajectory at Young Mavericks, ZEN Software provided an introduction to Multi-Cloud. How can you use cloud in Data Science and what choices are there in the field of Cloud as a toolset.

Back in 2014 i bought a Huawei B593s-22 which would allow me to be able to work non office locations using WiFi.

So using the router for a while all was fine and I had the option, when I ran out of my ‘daily allowance' of 5GB to add extra allowance with the push of a button inside the telco’s app. How happy everything was!

Then, for boring reasons: I switched to a provider with much better reception ✔️ however I lost the ability to push a button for extra GBs ❌

I arrogantly thought to simply put on my coding gloves and fix a little script in 1 evening to send out a SMS (cute!) for my extra allowance.

Our Maxeda team decided that we needed to improve our Application Performance Monitoring. We needed to develop the capability for distributed tracing and ended up having found SignalFX to be up for the job. Part of the introduction was a number of trainings to get the department familiar and all links to systems setup.

The Maxeda Digital team set out to experience ‘Epicenter’ in Kyiv. This massive DIY retailer was a good study object for our trip. In addition to the study-trip we made good progress on architectural improvements for frontend distribution and microservices implementation.

After a number of years working from a home office, 2019 is the year ZEN Software will have its own place. We are located just outside of the historic city centre of Alkmaar, The Netherlands.

As Hyperscale clouds are concerned: Google is a top-tier cloud provider. With its launch in 2011, thus the newest player in the market, GCP has quickly secured a stable market position with a unique offering in Big Data and AI services.

To start the Year 2019 off well, a team from the Amsterdam office flew to Kyiv to start the year. Celebrate past successes and plan for the coming year. Ukraine in winter is great, we were not disappointed with -12c.

Challenges for 2019 were to be as successful as 2018 when the team delivered a new e-commerce platform and finished the majority of the cloud transformation.

New Relic hosted an event in Amsterdam and I was happy to provide their customers about the use of New Relic and how to integrate their Application Performance Management tools into a large e-commerce platform.

New Relic provides key insights into both performance and stability of the platform, both microservices and the monolith backend.

At ZEN Software we’re able to help your organisation implement Application Performance Monitoring and provide your teams valuable insights into the software the teams are building and deploying

This July the teams in Brussels, Kyiv, Odessa and Amsterdam completed the main stage of the Cloud Transformation and we are ready for LAUNCH! 🚀

For technical and design workshops we set off to Odessa. We had a successful collaboration and solved a number of interesting digital puzzles. In good spirits we set off to have dinner outside in Odessa’s beautiful historic city center.

Some of the Amsterdam gang went for a run and sightseeing at once.

After the workshops were finished the team enjoyed the nightlife in Odessa, Club Ibiza.

When New Relic hosted an event, I was happy to share with their customers what we were up to at Maxeda. Our Cloud Transformation is in progress and our first phase of architecture design is complete.

After the talk the team went for a drink in the Okura bar. This was the exact moment that the platform started to bork. Luckily we were able to use New Relic and the present cloud team to debug the site and get it up and running in no time flat.

We joined a nice group of people in De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam to talk about how LeSS, Large Scale Scrum can help organisation scale their team based processes.

Large Scale Scrum is heavily influenced by Lean and can make what works great for teams work great for entire organisations. There are some challenges when implementing LeSS, mainly around knowledge and coordination of implementation of LeSS.

The discussions were interesting, definitely something we’ll be researching more the coming months!

Update 2017-05: Being certified LeSS practitioners, ZEN Software can help your organisation scale Agile too! Lear now? let’s get in touch!

Happy to kick start the software development teams at TextKernel with an introduction training Scrum. The training was interactive and we practiced a number of sprints, how to collaborate and estimate

Want to know more how your organisation can benefit from using Scrum or Agile? Contact us at ZEN Software and we’ll kick start your organisation too!

“Obeya” or ‘big room’ is what we used at Maxeda to jump start our Cloud Transformation and implementation of new cloud based e-commerce platform. The visuals, new design and flow of the new platform generated a number of very useful and interactive sessions with all digital stakeholders.

For the Maxeda Cloud Transformation and new e-commerce platform we scaled up our Software operation and setup new teams of experts at HYS Enterprise in Odessa.

This means introducing the teams into the ways of Maxeda, the systems and the plans for the near future. In 1 week we gave a number trainings and started to co-develop software straight away.

Together with Bridge Solutions founder and co-trainer Hugo Messer we provided a crash course Scrum.

Improve the team collaboration and production deployment of changes in your software with an Introduction training Scrum & Lean. In addition, ZEN Software can help teams with Continuous Delivery and provide or guide the necessary training with a Cloud-based CI/CD pipeline as Workshop

Find the training material here: Crash Course Scrum - handout

Bank Mendes Gans (BMG) recognized the need to embrace modern software development practices to stay ahead of the curve. Enter ZEN Software Tech Consultancy: whose expertise in DevOps and Continuous Delivery played a pivotal role in modernising BMG's software development processes.

Most organisations that develop software use some form of Agile Software Development. Spotify became famous for its own model: The Spotify model. This model is organised around teams called ‘squads’. While this organisational model is fairly well known, what’s less known is the office planning of the Spotify model. Just like the responsibilities and autonomy center around the team (squad), so do the facilities inside the office. each squad space has:

• 7 +/- 2 desks
• Meeting room
• Standup meeting facilities
• Relax/meet area

At Bank Mendes Gans, our System Team introduced Containers to the large and international team of developers. We tried to help our introduction to containers by explaining a very Dutch phenomenon: Summer Holiday Caravanning (to France) and bringing all food and supplies with you for the holiday. You could basically survive on the camp site, never needing to go to a local supermarket. With only a bit of electricity and a lavatory close by for 3 weeks. Growing up in a middle class family in The Netherlands this way of ‘celebrating holidays' was very well known to most Dutchies in the room.

As of today, the ZEN Software legal entity exists. As a one-man-army, I’ll be doing consultancy for all organisations wanting to improve their software development. “Purposeful Software Delivery” as motto for ZEN Software.

Inspired by Dan Pink’s TED talk about motivation and team work we set off to implement ‘Ship it/Fed ex days’ like Atlassian did.

Our version is called ‘Improvement Days’ and has the same goal, but different rules. All engineers and non-engineers were invited to join the improvement days.

Security awareness is very important when safeguarding the data of your customers. To improve the security awareness and have some fun at the same time we decided to hold a recurring training for all engineers and combine this with a shared hacking session.

Learn how to secure your software, learn how to program with security in mind and:

Last Year (2011) CyberTech was acquired by NICE Systems. So this year we started up the collaboration between the Development Office in Alkmaar, The Netherlands and Corporate HQ in Ra'anana, Israel.

I was part of a 4 person delegation from the Alkmaar office tasked to find out how to best work together and do a ‘show and tell’ about the Alkmaar products, architecture and processes.

We left Amsterdam late in the evening and landed in Tel Aviv early in the night. After waiting patiently for the security checks to be done, the four of us crammed ourselves in a small taxi near the airport.

Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux and Git, talks about version controlling the Linux kernel. He harps about the benefits of fully distributed version control with Git in particular. Torvalds has written Git himself after he received a fair bit of criticism for using the commercial BitKeeper (The Horror! 😉 ) to manage the Linux Kernel project for some time. At this moment there are very few version control systems that can operate fully distributed: CVS and SVN are specifically NOT suited for this task.