Derek Nerenberg | Senior Enterprise Architect
& Engagement Manager
Derek Nerenberg is the Senior. Enterprise Architect and Engagement Manager at XTIVIA. He leads and manages teams to successful outcomes for Liferay DXP (aka Liferay Portal) implementations with complex integrations. With 12+ years experience with Liferay, Derek has seen the product mature and grow from a developer point of view, enabling him to successfully guide clients to the right solutions to obtain their desired outcomes.
His expertise includes enterprise portal assessments, enterprise architecture, software estimation, workstream breakdown, project sizing, and custom portal application development to name a few. Some key highlights from his career include winning the 2015 President's Quality Award from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and his role in the program/engagement management on the HP Unison Partner Portal using the Liferay Portal platform, which became the one-stop shop for 500+ channel partners in the HP ecosystem.
Derek Nerenberg
Senior Enterprise Architect
& Engagement Manager
Derek Nerenberg is the Senior. Enterprise Architect and Engagement Manager at XTIVIA. He leads and manages teams to successful outcomes for Liferay DXP (aka Liferay Portal) implementations with complex integrations. With 12+ years experience with Liferay, Derek has seen the product mature and grow from a developer point of view, enabling him to successfully guide clients to the right solutions to obtain their desired outcomes.
His expertise includes enterprise portal assessments, enterprise architecture, software estimation, workstream breakdown, project sizing, and custom portal application development to name a few. Some key highlights from his career include winning the 2015 President's Quality Award from Hewlett Packard Enterprise and his role in the program/engagement management on the HP Unison Partner Portal using the Liferay Portal platform, which became the one-stop shop for 500+ channel partners in the HP ecosystem.
The Most Valuable Thing AI Can Do in Your Next Software Project Isn’t Writing Code
Let me paint a picture you’ve probably seen. A senior VP finally decides enough is enough. Their team has spent the last two years manually copying numbers between three different spreadsheets every Monday morning. One of those spreadsheets contains a pivot... read more
Intent-First Development for Engineering Managers and Directors
Your AI investment is paying off by every metric your dashboard tracks. Pull requests are up. Cycle time is down. The team is shipping at a rate that would have looked unusual two years ago. Something is also getting more expensive, and you cannot quite name what it... read more
Introduction to Altitude-Gated Design
AI can design your entire system in a single session. It will produce diagrams, component definitions, API contracts, database schemas, and deployment topology without pausing to ask whether any of it was right at the level above. This is the problem the Altitude-Gated Design Protocol exists to solve.
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Using Intent-First Development on a Greenfield Project
Adopt Intent-First Development (IFD) on your greenfield project. Master the 5-pass methodology to build structured, altitude-gated design documentation using any AI assistant.
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Applying Intent-First Development on Existing Projects
The cornerstone piece on Intent-First Development argues that AI assistance has decoupled the rate of typing from the rate of reasoning, and the only way to keep the two in step is to make reasoning durable — captured, structured, and read back by future AI... read more
How to Build Software Without Being a Developer
There is someone you know — maybe you — who has been carrying a vision of a system that should exist. It might be a tool that would solve a real problem in their company, the kind of problem that everyone complains about and nobody fixes because the people with the... read more
Why Intent Matters More Than Code
There is a quiet pattern in every AI-collaborative codebase we’ve worked on. The code arrives faster than ever. The pull requests are clean. The tests pass. And six weeks later, no one can quite explain why the system is the shape it is. We used to think the... read more
Introduction to Intent-First Development
Software’s hardest problem used to be the ‘how’ — the syntax, the tests, and the shipping. AI just collapsed the cost of solving it. But in doing so, it created a more dangerous one: our typing rate has finally decoupled from our reasoning rate. When... read more
Modernizing Liferay: Moving from Plugins SDK to Client Extensions
Liferay Client Extensions are transforming how developers customize DXP. Discover how this modern, modular approach replaces the legacy Plugins SDK – making Liferay faster, cloud-ready, and easier to maintain than ever before.
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Why Liferay DXP Is a Smart Choice for Composable Architecture
Liferay DXP empowers enterprises to embrace composable architecture with modern tooling, decoupled frontends, low-code data models, and seamless system integration. Whether you’re modernizing legacy apps or building new digital experiences, Liferay provides the flexibility, scalability, and developer-friendly stack to get there faster as a composable digital experience platform.
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Microsoft Copilot Overview: The Ultimate Guide to AI-Powered Productivity
SUMMARY: XTIVIA’s comprehensive guide details how organizations can leverage the Microsoft Copilot ecosystem—spanning Microsoft 365, GitHub, and Security—to integrate artificial intelligence directly into daily operations, enhancing automation and decision-making. The... read more
Why Should I Upgrade Liferay?
I can give you a lot of reasons to upgrade Liferay. I’ve seen some large companies spend LOTS of money building out something incredible on the Liferay platform, then take a “lights on” approach almost as soon as the product launches. With the... read more
Liferay DXP Audience Targeting 2.0 Overview
This article is a primer intended to give you a Liferay DXP Audience Targeting overview. You do not need to know much (or anything) about Liferay in order to understand the concepts laid out here. You may have noticed personalized web experiences are everywhere. Once... read more