Overview
Maarten Raes is a co-founder of Ballistix, based in Gent. He has worked at Ballistix as a software engineer since January 2019 and took up the co-founder role in June 2021. Earlier in 2019, from January to August, he was a software engineer at FTRPRF Education. He studied ICT - Web & Mobile at Hogeschool Odisee, completing a bachelor's degree between 2016 and 2019.
Career history
In the news
- Mijn antwoord wanneer mensen vragen wat ik doe: "A sh*t-ton of context switching and a bit of everything, while trying to keep everybody alligned and move things forward! 🚀" Sommigen noemen het operations lead, anderen noemen het polyvalent medewerker, beide zijn waar. De koekjesdoos en frigo vullen zichzelf niet! (En ja, de blikjes moeten uit het plastiek voordat ze in de frigo gaan.)
- Why build the same thing faster, when we could aim 10x higher?" - Last trend of my HOGENT talk. A callcenter recently automated 80% of its easiest customer requests. The ROI was clear: free up the operators from routine work, let them focus on the hard cases. Three months later: record-breaking burnout. Sick leave through the roof. What happened: operators now only handled the 20% of calls AI couldn't - the angry, the complex, the impossible. Their entire day was screaming customers. Before, 80% of conversations ended with a polite
- With change comes opportunity." - Fourth trend of my HOGENT talk: Team ratio are close to inverting. Classic product teams: 1 PO per 6 engineers. At Ballistix.digital we were never quite there, since we're not product. More like 1 to 4. Today we're heading toward 1 to 2. Same engineering team, more projects running in parallel than ever. The bottleneck shifted to analysis, while building used to be the constraint. We're hiring freelance analysts, solution architects and PM capacity - to manage the projects, not to build. My own
- Tactical coding is dying. Strategists survive." - Third trend of my HOGENT talk. Recently at Ballistix.digital: a functional analyst used AI to spec out a ticket, down to the field name. The engineer built it pixel-perfect, with some AI help. User entity: firstname. Every other project we ship uses firstName. Result: a frontend full of user.firstName ?? user.firstname fallbacks. Two AI-assisted humans in a row, and neither stopped to ask if the field should match the rest of our system. Review caught it. Tactical engineers ask: did
- AI as a tool is never smarter than the user." - Second trend of my HOGENT talk. Recently at Ballistix.digital: an engineer had built a brand new table component. Clean code, working. Problem was, we already have one in our component library. Not wrong. Just very much unwanted. Agency life is all about cross-project consistency. AI got the implementation right. The engineer didn't think to ask whether it was the right thing to build. Think of it as learning to drive in a Ferrari. The car is fine. It's just not the car that
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