A fictional software agency. Real developer problems. This page introduces the characters and the recurring formats of our YouTube series.
Mediensysteme Münsterland GmbH, along with its staff and customers, is fictional. The technologies and problems follow the real everyday life of software development. The agency is not a real company and not a subsidiary of PHP Schmiede KG.
The agency behind our ongoing series builds web applications, backends, interfaces and shop solutions — and has existed since the early 2000s. The series follows staff, customers and projects over a longer period. The company does not stand still: projects begin and end, and decisions have consequences.
Senior backend developer / technical lead · 52
"Show me the line."
Eighteen years in the house. Dry, experienced and rarely impressed. While others are still explaining, Bernd wants to know where exactly the problem is. His mug is always in his hand and the coffee usually cold.
Recurring: Coffee: cold
Apprentice software developer · 18
"But why?"
Asks the questions everyone else gave up on long ago. Actually reads error messages to the last sentence.
Recurring: Asks again
Backend / full-stack developer · 25
"Half an hour, tops."
Usually finds a solution very quickly. In his estimates he just likes to forget everything that comes after the actual programming.
Recurring: Estimate: 30 minutes
Backend developer / quality and risk · 26
"Three weeks. At least."
She does not think pessimistically. She is simply already thinking about the problems everyone else will discover tomorrow.
Recurring: Risk found: of course
UI/UX and frontend · 31
"And on a phone?"
Sees colours, spacing, visual noise and usability problems before anyone else notices that something is off.
Recurring: "Those two clash."
Frontend developer / UI perfectionist · 29
"That is not sitting right yet."
For others two pixels are two pixels. For Jonas they are a problem.
Recurring: Two more pixels
Project manager, customer contact · 41
"What he actually said was …"
Understands customers and developers well enough to contradict both. She translates between the two worlds.
Project manager, planning · 47
"I have a buffer for that."
Thinks in calendar weeks and stays calm even when everyone else already sees a problem.
Information and reception · 44
"I know who that is."
Recognises regular customers after a few words and decides, entirely as a matter of course, who gets put through right now. That applies to the managing director too.
Recurring: Knows who is calling
Assistant to the management · 33
"Then something else drops out."
Rarely says no outright. He explains the consequences of a decision for so long that the matter either improves or sorts itself out.
Founder and managing director · 58
"Can we not do it cheaper?"
Built the company and spends no money that, in his view, does not have to be spent. Different rules may apply to coffee.
Recurring: "What does that cost?"
Story shorts show small moments: Petra does not put Bröker through because Gerhard is eating. Finn finds something in the legacy code. Timo and Nora argue about an estimate. Jonas moves something by two pixels. Svenja says that two colours clash.
They belong to the series universe — but the main episodes remain understandable without a single short.
The main episodes run 5 to 10 minutes and tell larger stories about customer projects, releases, legacy systems and technical decisions. The series is organised in seasons.
Bröker Landtechnik wants an existing customer and dealer portal modernised. What at first looks like a manageable overhaul quickly develops into a substantial legacy project with old data, interfaces and dependencies that nobody fully knows.
The arc of the season: can Mediensysteme Münsterland GmbH modernise the old Bröker system without everything falling apart in the process?
Recurring formats between customers, code and the calendar.
What the customer says and what the developer hears.
"We did not change anything."
Excavations in projects nobody wants to touch any more.
A TODO comment from 2011
PHP dies regularly. According to the internet, at least.
The moment when nothing at all should happen any more.
And then the phone rings.
One wish, two ideas of what it means.
The same words, an entirely different meaning.
"Just very quickly." → The afternoon is gone.
Straight into a situation everyone knows.
You open a project from 2011.
The perfect answer meets a real project.
Updates, plugins, caches and other surprises.
One term, half a minute, understood.
API · cron job · merge conflict
Finn moves into his second and third year of training and later finishes his apprenticeship. Roles and skills change, staff join or leave, customers come back — and earlier decisions become relevant again at some point.
Everything can be connected. Nothing has to be: a main episode can raise a technical problem that a tutorial explains in detail later, a real developer news item can come up in the office, a running gag can become part of a larger story. There are no fixed intervals and no prescribed order — the formats work independently of one another as well.
PHP Schmiede KG is a real company and builds custom software, web applications, APIs and Shopware solutions. Mediensysteme Münsterland GmbH is made up and exists only in our YouTube series. On the channel we combine real technical topics with that fictional agency world.