Caroline Artz

“Redpanda takes the responsibility of managing #Kafka off our team’s plate, while allowing us to keep sensitive customer data in our own infrastructure. It’s the best of both worlds.” — Ted O'Hayer, HealthEdge Learn why a #healthcare SaaS company replaced #Confluent with Redpanda's BYOC offering for simpler operations AND lower costs while remaining HIPAA compliant. 💪 Read the full case study ⬇️ https://lnkd.in/gnFkARGP

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Last night at Founder Institute night out in Chicago, I met Wendelin Dunlap MSD, M.Ed., CDE, CPC, a user on ChaChing Social and an expert on building accessible products. I was showing her our blog reader on ChaChing Social and asked how we can make it more accessible for people with dyslexia, she mentioned there's an actual font called the Dyslexia Font, and that it's proven to make reading easier for people with dyslexia. So I went home, dived into a rabbit hole, had a deep conversation with Gemini and found these insights: - Line Spacing (Leading): Aim for 1.5 (150%). This provides enough "breathing room" between lines so the reader doesn't accidentally skip a line or reread the same one. - Letter Spacing (Tracking): At least 0.12 times the font size. For example, if your font is 12pt, the letter spacing should be at least 1.44pt. - Word Spacing: At least 0.16 times the font size. Words should be clearly distinct from one another to prevent them from merging into a single block of text. - Paragraph Spacing: At least 2 times the font size. This helps visually "chunk" information into manageable pieces When you read our blogs, you can switch on "Reader Mode" on the top right-hand side, and you can read our blogs in a more accessible way. Does this make reading much easier? Are there other ways we can make it easier?

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We don’t talk enough about this kind of leadership. Last week, forgecode shipped a feature that degraded response quality. Instead of hiding it, they: - Admitted the mistake publicly - Explained what went wrong - Fixed it promptly In the AI space, it’s easy to chase growth at all costs. But accountability is what builds real trust. The companies that own their mistakes and put customers first? They’re the ones that will win long-term. We need more of this energy in tech.

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The Narrative Code Contemplating how our systems tell stories: Simple state models: "This is how things are now." Event sourcing: "This is how we got here." CQRS: "Different questions need different stories." The architecture you choose shapes the questions your business can ask about itself. #softwarearchitecture #ddd #coding

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Curious: has anyone found a particular sub-agent role or setup that's been especially powerful? Would love to compare notes. I've been experimenting with Claude agent teams lately, and one thing stands out: the software paradigms we've always relied on (API design, test coverage, modularity) matter more when working with AI, not less. Giving each sub-agent a specific role (Team Lead, Frontend Dev, Backend Dev, QA Engineer) produced noticeably better results than asking one agent to do everything. Wrote up what I learned using a calculator app as the example. Link in the comments.

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We're diving into spec-driven development at scale and keen to hear how others are approaching it. Are you using a structured framework like GSD, or keeping it lean with vanilla models and some light templating? What's working, what's not? And the real question: did it finally give you the excuse to kill Jira? Drop a comment — would love to compare notes.

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2025 was a watershed year for digital accessibility compliance. The numbers tell the story: - 4,975+ lawsuits filed (20% increase from 2024) - Illinois saw a 746% spike in cases - The FTC fined accessiBe $1 million for misleading claims - The European Accessibility Act went into effect June 28 - Government entities face April 2026 deadlines The takeaway? Automated widgets don't work, litigation is expanding beyond traditional hotspots, and there are no shortcuts to real accessibility. We've published a comprehensive analysis of what made 2025 the year compliance became unavoidable and what businesses need to know heading into 2026. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/gCZxKx_Q #Accessibility #DigitalAccessibility #ADA #WCAG #WebAccessibility #A11y

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Excited to share a recent conversation I had with Ankit Jain, a community leader in the Developer Experience space and Co-founder/CEO of Aviator, where we dug into what it's like being a PM in the DevEx space. We covered some key themes: 🛠️ Why internal developers deserve the same care and empathy as external customers 🧠 How core product principles—like understanding the problem deeply—still drive success, even in highly technical spaces 📊 What meaningful impact looks like in DevEx If you're curious about building for builders or just want to hear how DevEx works behind the scenes at scale, give it a listen: 🎧 https://lnkd.in/gUpm4-Np #DevEx #ProductManagement #DeveloperExperience #podcast

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How GSD turns Claude into a self-steering developer The speed at which ClawdBot MoltBot OpenClaw climbed in popularity was quite phenomenal, and for good reason: It has an audience beyond the developer space, especially those who just want to experiment with digital assistance. Todays post continues my journey with GSD, but the LLM agent landscape is changing rapidly and this shooting star caught everyone’s eye. At its core, OpenClaw is a locally hosted, open-source AI assistant that runs on your computer or server. You talk to it through apps you probably already use, like WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal, or even iMessage. And it really “does stuff” — sometimes too well. It is a gateway service that maintains WebSocket connections and includes a smart orchestration layer for working with LLM agents. Stay connected for industry’s latest content – Follow Deepthi Talasila #DevSecOps #ApplicationSecurity #AgenticAI #CloudSecurity #CyberSecurity #AIinSecurity #SecureDevOps #AppSec #AIandSecurity #CloudComputing #SecurityEngineering #ZeroTrust #MLSecurity #AICompliance #SecurityAutomation #SecureCoding #linkedin #InfoSec #SecurityByDesign #AIThreatDetection #CloudNativeSecurity #ShiftLeftSecurity #SecureAI #AIinDevSecOps #SecurityOps #CyberResilience #DataSecurity #SecurityInnovation #SecurityArchitecture #TrustworthyAI #AIinCloudSecurity #NextGenSecurity https://lnkd.in/g8YPff7n

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I’ve been writing a series of posts on the design principles behind Looping, a product I’m building to help teams run and evolve software over time. These principles shape the architecture underneath and have helped me prioritize clarity, composability, and long-term maintainability from the start. The latest post in the series is about Composable Services. In Looping, every service follows the same interface: it takes a hash of input and returns either Success() or Failure(). That consistency makes services easy to test, reuse, and chain together without resorting to sprawling conditionals or unpredictable side effects. The post walks through the structure, shows real examples, and touches on how it tracks source chains for observability and event logging. https://lnkd.in/ePkn-pF6 #ruby #rails #softwarearchitecture #buildinpublic

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I love thinking about how decisions are made and how to empower teams to own their decisions. I've been working on standing up an Architecture Advice Process based on Andrew Harmel Law's Facilitating Software Architecture and applying strategies and tactics I've learned from others (Peter Hunter / Elena Stojmilova / Luca Mezzalira). Below is one of my favorite representations of how this affects decentralization and speed. What I've noticed is that within each team, the other decision-making models still apply. Each team will find itself somewhere on the curve, but scoped to its context. What I find interesting about this, as someone trying to facilitate and encourage using the process across teams sitting at different places, is that where the team is placed on the curve might indicate how willing they are to engage with the process. As a team moves from the top left to the bottom right, how might they feel about changing how they work? I'm really curious what others are seeing.

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