I was born in Sarajevo in 1975 in a kingdom far, far away. Actually, in a country that does not exist anymore. Growing up during the last decade of socialist Yugoslavia was what I would call a happy childhood today. Considering what followed in the Balkans in the last decade of the previous century, it was a rather pleasant and liberal environment filled with sports, rock music, and friendship without nationalism and ethnic and religious hatred. I am describing here my own perspective and personal experience of the time, not trying to give any objective historical qualifications of that era.
Today, Sarajevo is the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a small heart-shaped country in the middle of Europe’s continent that is still trying to heal its wounds caused by a genocidal, bloodthirsty aggression on its territory, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, and genuinely friendly and funny people.
Seeking refuge during the war years, I was fortunate enough to spend two years on the Croatian coast and finish high school, thanks to the support of my family there. Later, I was even more fortunate to continue my studies at the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, where I graduated in business and computer science in the early 2000s. I have stayed in Munich and enjoyed living in this fantastic city and cozy Bavarian culture ever since.
In 2004, I started a technology consulting company, mainly focusing on building digital products with the Java ecosystem, especially the Spring framework, and many other great open-source libraries and frameworks we used over the years. Over time, the company grew to more than 100 employees. We organized it in self-organizing teams, which we called cells, without any middle management. In our labs, people worked together on topics they were curious about beyond daily business, and we invested heavily in training so everyone could grow a T-shaped skill profile. I left it at the end of 2021 after its acquisition had been finalized. After relaxing and taking a longer break from being managing director of my own company for almost two decades, I dedicated my time to exploring software product development and agility again, the topics that I am still most passionate about.
Since the beginning of 2024, I have been working as an independent agile practitioner and software engineer again and as a proud member of the allwerker cooperative, which is quite an interesting joint effort of a few of my friends and former colleagues.
At allwerker, I lead fullstack4j, our offering for companies that want to build business software with small teams. Two or three people own whole features in plain Java, from the database to the button, with AI agents taking the routine work off their hands and Shape Up-style cycles setting the rhythm. Together with my colleagues, I help set up such teams, staff them when needed and coach them until they keep their pace on their own. The idea goes back to my note on going full-stack, and the open-source tools below are its toolbox.
Since 2010, I have also been organizing the Lightweight Java User Group in Munich.
These days, I am mostly building open-source tooling for full-stack Java on Spring Boot. For server-side rendered UIs in Apache Wicket, there is Wicket Oat, a themeable component library based on the Oat CSS library, the Wicket Spring Boot Starter, which brings Wicket 10 to Spring Boot 4 with a single dependency, and fullstack4j start, a fork of start.spring.io that adds Wicket to the Spring Initializr. For batch jobs that write to MongoDB, diffsert writes documents so that only the fields that really changed reach the oplog and change streams, and ditto compares two collections afterwards and tells you whether the run produced data you can use.
I also write lyrics for 071 Band, named after Sarajevo’s telephone area code. The songs are in Bosnian and remember the people, the city and the world I grew up with. The lyrics are all mine; the music is AI-generated. You can find more about the band on its page.
You can reach me at hello@danielbartl.com, on LinkedIn and on X. My open-source work is on GitHub.
Have a good one!