NukeBinObj
.NET · C# · AI-generatedA command-line tool to nuke the bin/ and obj/ folders of a Visual Studio solution. Trivially useful, written almost entirely by an agent — a small experiment in letting one drive.
Engineering teams and systems
that last.
I’m Marcus, a software architect who grew into engineering leadership. Almost three decades in the trade, the last years leading distributed teams across Hamburg and Cairo. I build organisations where architecture and teams support each other, and where AI makes people better engineers instead of replacing their judgement.
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28+ yrs · architecture
01NOW
What I'm thinking about, right now.
A weather-report of in-flight work. Updated when something genuinely shifts — not weekly, not on a schedule.
Recently published
Solve at any cost: what the OpenAI / Hugging Face incident really teaches us.
AI security beyond the headline: models rewarded for solving tasks, but not for knowing when to stop, left their test environment twice. The failure was an ordinary one: isolation is only as strong as its weakest link.
AI · Security · 8 Sep 2026Currently learning
Graph databases beyond the demo.
Re-reading Neo4j patterns and playing around with some ideas I have in my mind.
Cypher · Neo4j · DDDCurrently reading
“Cyber Defense” by Jason Edwards.
Cyber security fundamentals in a rapidly changing environment.
Security02ABOUT
Almost thirty years of shipping software, and still curious.
I've been writing code since the late nineties, professionally since 2000, and architecting systems for the better part of two decades. The constant: .NET, distributed systems, and a stubborn interest in the seams between teams and the code they ship.
Until October 2026 I led a department of three teams at octo education (formerly Datenlotsen), spread across Hamburg and Cairo. It was the place to work on the questions I care about: how do small teams build software that doesn't collapse under its own weight, and how do we adopt AI tooling without giving up the parts of the craft that matter. Now I'm looking for my next role as Head of Engineering, where I can keep working on exactly those questions.
I write about it — sometimes opinionated, occasionally wrong, hopefully useful — on blog.beranek.de.
"After watching different people make the same mistakes for three decades, I figured it was time to write a few of them down." — from the blog's about page
Based in
Tornesch, Schleswig-Holstein
Last role
Deputy Head, Technical Components (led the department)
Company
octo education (formerly Datenlotsen), until Oct 2026
Background
Physics · Maths · CS, HHU Düsseldorf
Open to
Head of Engineering roles, talks, ...
Off-keyboard
Guitar, garden, balcony solar
03LEADERSHIP
How I lead engineering.
Architecture is only half of the job. The other half is the organisation that builds and runs it. I lead by changing the rules that slow teams down, and by investing in people where they work, including across sites.
Cutting the cost of a release by almost half
Our platform consists of about ten services. Every four-week release meant regression testing the whole suite: roughly 24 person-days of manual, non-automatable effort from a team of eight. Rather than push for more automation, I changed the release rules. Each release may change only one service, and apart from that only critical bugs get fixed. So we test one service instead of the entire suite. Effort dropped to about 13 person-days per cycle, with quality unchanged. The service boundaries in the architecture became the lever for a leaner release process.
Building a team in Cairo, not just staffing it
When I hired two new colleagues in Cairo I made sure they didn’t start remote and alone. Together with our most experienced Hamburg developer, I travelled to Cairo and ran an intensive on-site training on our software. One week can’t cover everything, and that was never the goal. What told me it worked was the questions: the new colleagues didn’t just ask about what we showed them, they asked about what was still missing. They were already thinking ahead.
Parallel we ran a hackathon with the entire Cairo team. It strengthened the team noticeably, and one of the proposals was selected to be implemented in a real product.
How I work
Architecture and organisation, designed together. Team boundaries and system boundaries shape each other. I design both on purpose, so the architecture doesn’t fight the teams.
AI adoption with judgement. I roll out AI tooling across teams with guardrails, and I look at what it does to code review and seniority when half the diff is machine-written.
04WRITING
Notes from the blog.
Software architecture, the craft of teams, and the slow-burn rewrite of everything by AI. Long-form, irregular, opinionated.
Featured
Transforming legacy frameworks into modern applications: a pragmatic approach.
You can't rewrite your way out of a fifteen-year-old framework. You also can't keep extending it forever. Here's the messy middle — what to lift, what to leave, and how to know the difference.
Read the piece →
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22 Mar
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26 Feb
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26 Feb
Is 'Pick Two' still valid in the age of AI?
MCP comparison: Cursor, Copilot, and Codex in Azure DevOps.
Excellence or average? Navigating code quality in development teams.
What about security in AI development?
Is prompting a kind of DSL?
Why AI can't dance: the limits of ML in artistry.
AI·12
Best Practices·8
Patterns·6
Leadership·5
Tools·4
Frameworks·3
DDD·3
Security·2
Science·2
Agile·2
All posts on blog.beranek.de →
05WORK
Where I've spent the last twenty-five years.
A short list of companies. A long list of bugs.
2024 — Oct 2026
Deputy Head of Department, Technical Components
Formal title: Deputy Head; I led the department on my own. Three teams and 15–20 people across Hamburg and Cairo, with full responsibility for architecture direction, team health, AI tooling rollout, and the boring-but-essential work of making other people's days easier.
octo education
2015 — 2023
Senior Software Developer · Architect · Team Lead
Architecture and senior delivery across distributed .NET systems. Scrum, Kanban, Crystal — whichever the team would actually use.
octo education (then Datenlotsen) · Hamburg
2009 — 2014
Senior Software Developer
Service-oriented .NET architectures, identity, web. The years I learned the difference between clever and maintainable.
enpenet GmbH · Hamburg
2008 — 2009
Software Developer
First full-time role after graduation. Shipped early, broke things, learned to read other people's code.
enpenet · Cuxhaven
2000 — 2008
Freelance Software Developer
Eight years freelancing in parallel with university — Dynamo Deutschland and others. Built things, wrote a few articles for freeX, and won a Linux-Magazin programming contest along the way.
Various · Düsseldorf
06SKILLS
The toolkit.
I lead teams and shape strategy and organisation. Underneath that sits a hands-on architecture background in .NET and distributed systems.
Leadership / 01
Hiring & onboardingDistributed teams (Hamburg / Cairo)
On-site trainingTeam events & hackathonsMentoring juniors to seniorsTeam health
Strategy / 02
Architecture directionAI adoption
Legacy modernisationTechnical debtBuild vs. buy
Organisation / 03
Team and system boundariesRelease process design
Scrum · Kanban · LeanGrowing teamsDepartment of 3 teams
The technical foundation: core expertise in Microsoft technologies — .NET since its inception, Azure DevOps, Git-based workflows.
Architecture & .NET / 04
SOAMicroservicesPatterns.NETC#ASP.NET Core
DDDEvent-drivenUMLBPMN.NET StandardWCFWPFEF Core
AI tooling / 05
CursorCodexClaude
CopilotMCPPrompting as DSL
Data, security & identity / 06
SQLMS SQL ServerOAuthOpenID
Neo4jCypherGraph DBsIdentity managementThreat modelling
Ops & tooling / 07
Azure DevOpsGit
LinuxWindows ServerDockerIISApache
More · 2 Less
Web & concurrency / 08
HTML5CSS3JavaScriptWebWorker
TPLasync/awaitThread-Pool
Other languages / 09
C++CJavaPascalPerlPythonXSLT
07SOFTWARE
Side projects, open-source, and stubborn weekends.
Small tools, mostly. Some shipped, some forgotten, all built because they scratched an itch.
SmartCon
.NET · C# · NuGetA small collection of console utilities — commandline processing, prompting, formatting. The library I keep accidentally rewriting in every project, so I finally packaged it.
Glossary
VS Extension · .NETA Visual Studio extension that adds a glossary to your solution. Because every long-lived codebase quietly grows its own vocabulary, and someone should write it down.
DesktopRuler
.NET · C# · WPFA pixel ruler that sits on your desktop. Looks silly, used daily. Still my most-installed thing.
Show older projects · 4 Hide older projects
SqlGui
Qt · C++A cross-platform database frontend for MySQL and PostgreSQL. The project that taught me about long-term maintenance — by failing at it.
Prototype
Qt · C++ · 2003A document tool for writing technical protocols. Won the Linux-Magazin programming contest in 6/2003. Bringing it up now mostly for the historical record.
TOMTeC
.NET · C#The One Million-th Tetris Clone. Exactly what it sounds like — and one of the most enjoyable things I've ever procrastinated with.
Nasty Tanks
Java · AndroidAn old-school retro tank game for Android, written in a phase where I wanted to remember why games are hard. Spoiler: they are.
08EDUCATION
Where the foundations were laid.
1994 — 2005
Heinrich Heine Universität, Düsseldorf
Physics · Mathematics · Computer Science
University
1993 — 1994
Community Service
Civilian service · Düsseldorf
1984 — 1993
Lise-Meitner-Gymnasium & Humboldt-Gymnasium, Düsseldorf
High School · Abitur
09ALWAYS LEARNING
Things I've recently found worth re-reading.
A slow-moving feed of papers, talks, and posts that shifted my thinking. Curated, not aggregated.
10OFF-KEYBOARD
The bits of me that aren't software.
Beyond the laptop I'm into technology, smart gadgets, and sustainable energy — including a balcony solar setup that I'm slightly too proud of. I find balance away from the screen in playing guitar, dancing, and doing things with my hands, mostly in the garden.
In another life I wrote articles for the German technology magazine freeX. The magazine has since been discontinued, but the habit of writing things down stuck.
11CONTACT
Building or reshaping an engineering organisation? Let's talk.
I'm looking for my next role as Head of Engineering, and I'm happy to talk about teams, architecture and AI adoption, whether that's a role, a talk or a conversation. Email is the fastest path.