Author: Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

Michael Kaufmann is the CEO of Xpirit Germany, a Microsoft Regional Director (RD) and a Microsoft MVP. He has been working as an IT consultant for more than 20 years. Mike is a published book author, keynote speaker, and regular technical speaker at international conferences. Ask him about DevOps, Git, Agile, and GitHub.
ai, DevOps, ProductivityLeave a comment

AI Won’t Save Your Company – Until These Three Layers Work Together

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

Most AI transformation initiatives fail not because of weak technology, but because the operating model behind them is broken. Enterprises invest in AI tools, copilots, and machine learning pilots, yet struggle to scale real business value. The missing link is structural alignment. To unlock sustainable AI value, organizations must align three critical layers: how work flows from idea to production, how governance and platform enablement remove friction, and how leadership shapes risk, incentives, and decision-making. Without this alignment, even the most advanced AI strategy will stall inside approval chains, compliance bottlenecks, and risk-averse cultures. AI success is not a tooling problem — it is an operating model test. Continue reading AI Won’t Save Your Company – Until These Three Layers Work Together

Development, DevOps, Productivity1 Comment

Stop Counting Keystrokes: Why AI Isn’t Making Developers More Productive (Yet) — And How to Fix Your Measurement

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

AI makes developers feel 20% faster while actually being 19% slower. The problem isn’t AI — it’s how we measure productivity. Learn why DORA metrics and value stream thinking are the only way to evaluate AI’s real impact on software delivery. Continue reading Stop Counting Keystrokes: Why AI Isn’t Making Developers More Productive (Yet) — And How to Fix Your Measurement

Community, DevOps, GitHub4 Comments

Accelerate DevOps – What I’ve learned writing a book about GitHub

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

When I was asked to write a book about GitHub, I first came up with an outline that had an introduction to DevOps with nearly 200 pages and then covered all GitHub Features in a logical order. “Nobody wants to read a 200-page introduction” was the the response from my editor that made me completely rethink what I wanted to write about and how I should structure it. The story Telling a story is hard – finding a story worth telling is even harder. I wanted to give my readers a practical guide to DevOps. There are many books and … Continue reading Accelerate DevOps – What I’ve learned writing a book about GitHub

Community, DevOps, GitHubLeave a comment

Speaking at KCDC

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking at the Kansas City Developer Conference (KCDC). I had one talk and one workshop: Application security from start to finish (handout) Hands-on workshop GitHub Code to Cloud (handout) You can download the handouts from the links above. If you attended one of my sessions and want a free copy of my book – ping me and I’ll arrange that. What is KCDC? KCDC is a community conference in Kansas City with more than 1,600 attendees. I has no singe-track keynotes but directly dive into the 15 parallel tracks. There are tracks about … Continue reading Speaking at KCDC

DevOps, git, GitHub2 Comments

Should you require all developers to sign all local commits?

Michael (Mike) Kaufmann

A discussion I have quit often is about the recommendation if companies should require all their developers to sign their commits locally or not. Here is my perspective on that matter. Background Git is very powerful and gives you the possibility to alter existing commits. But this also means, that the author of a commit is not necessarily the one that is committing the code. A commit has two fields: author and committer. Both fields get set to the values of user.name and user.email from git config plus a timestamp. If you rebase, for example, the committer changes to the … Continue reading Should you require all developers to sign all local commits?