In an age of silos and centralization, trying to curate the web may seem like a folly. Luckily, if you're looking, you'll still be able to find plenty of individual initiatives, that provide lenses into the worthwhile parts of the web. If you have a few hours to spare to go down … | Continue reading
I am using nginx as reverse proxy for a handful of small applications. I recently added one where for convenience I only wanted to require basic authentication for the endpoints that write data. The nginx configuration files are not exactly my daily concern, so to save future me … | Continue reading
Manuel host this months indieweb carnival on the topic of Digital Relationships. He also, nearly one year ago, happens to have started an initiative in which among several others I have followed suit in: an offer to become regular reader of your personal website. I'll take this a … | Continue reading
As my family and I are looking forward to move into a new home in January, the next weeks will be filled by throwing out junk that accumulated over the years, packing up our belongings into boxes, looking for new furniture etc.pp. and I'll likely be hard-pressed for time to write … | Continue reading
I've recently made a few accessibility improvements for the site. For one, I finally got around to add a skip-to-content link to the navigation, mostly following along an article from CSS Tricks, with very few tweaks. And I replaced the sorttable script for the tables of content … | Continue reading
Since this week my parental part-time is over, I'm back to working my standard 40 hours. With so much of my time to available to the company again, sure enough somebody deemed it a good idea to assign a training course on GDPR to me. Ok, in all fairness, that course was probably … | Continue reading
...and then your tools start to shape you. So, after I've managed last week to switch over to my custom SSG for building the website, this week I spent time to play around and explore a few things, that I would not have done, if I needed to maintain them manually. The first addit … | Continue reading
I've wanted to replace the scripts with which I create this website for quite some time now. My most important goal was to be able to build the site with a single command. Generating the RSS feed turned out to be a bit of a tyranical edge case. Within the last week I got to the p … | Continue reading
In Gregor Hohpe's book The Software Architect Elevator there is a chapter with the beautiful headline: If you never kill anything, you will live among zombies - And they will eat your brain. As I hinted last week, dead and undead code isn't very satisfying to work with, so in the … | Continue reading
I spent a good deal of the work week convincing myself that multiple layers of data mapping from one anemic domain model to another were indeed soundly and safely removeable. I generally try to apply Chesterton's fence when dealing with inherited code. Each layer between system b … | Continue reading
Hillel Wayne wrote about educational codebases. I find the idea quite interesting, and have been trying to gather some further thoughts into an article, but while writing it, my doubts grew on how feasible the idea beyond a certain threshold of complexity really is. While Hillel … | Continue reading
There is this saying, that when you aren't embarrased by the first version of a software, you have shipped too late. I am not entirely convinced of its merit, but anyway, I put the repo of the static site generator I talked about before on github. Does the world really need anoth … | Continue reading
Sometimes engineers have a tendency to solve problems with people by solely technical measures. Everything to avoid an unpleasant conversation. Somebody directly pushed to trunk instead of going through a code process: let's revoke right to push for all devs (instead of talking a … | Continue reading
Weeks pass frighteningly fast. All the worse, when you don't feel that there's much to show for it. I had a bit time to hack on my static site generator, still I don't have reached feature parity with my messy scripts. Some time ago I wrote something about keeping a prioritized l … | Continue reading
A little bit over a year ago, I published the last weeknote. It was after a very rough week, which included a bursted pipe in the appartment and a biliary colic. After that week I had lost my momentum an published neither weeknotes, nor regular articles for the following six mont … | Continue reading
I recently experimented a bit with lunr.js, because I wanted to learn a bit about information retrieval techniques, by trying to read the codebase in depth. The library itself is comparatively small, since it doesn't aim to be everything to everyone, but still it delivers a compl … | Continue reading
Something that I regularly think about, almost everytime I select something to read through for furthering my knowledge in my field, is if there is something like a canonical set of reading material. On the other side of the Atlantic ocean there is a concept of a liberal arts edu … | Continue reading
No website is guaranteed to exist for ever, not even for a timespan that significantly outlives its original author. Keeping one up and running is, although very cheap, not entirely free. But even loss-leader offerings like github pages or the aws free tier are payed for by someb … | Continue reading
Since I started my website, I published 38 posts (this one not included), which means on average a little more than once a month, but my publishing cadence is far from being that regular. In some months I managed to put out something on a weekly basis, but I've also had dry spell … | Continue reading
Last year one evening my whole family was asleep unusually early. On contrast, I was not particularly tired, which is equally unusual. I used the time that I unexpectedly had at my disposal to write a tiny web app for managing my bookmarks. Initially my goal for this article was … | Continue reading
Picking colors for elements on a website is not merely an aesthetic detail, it also matters for accessibility. After I introduced a dark mode for the website, Tosh kindly provided feedback with regard to the color choices I made, or as in this case more importantly did not make. … | Continue reading
At the risk of losing a lot of nerd cred: I, by and large, prefer light mode. But I'm not dogmatic about it. Media queries make it very easy to detect the readers preference and CSS custom properties help keeping the rest of the styling clean and non-repetitive. So I thought it w … | Continue reading
As often, I am somewhat late to the party, but on the other hand, maybe you are one of today's lucky ten-thousand... So, did you know, that when you type the words do a barrel roll (without quotation marks) into Google's search field, the page with the results does as you bid, an … | Continue reading
Manuel has expressed some strong objections against internal links. While I indeed think, that Manuel is right with his call to link to other websites as much as you can because that's the best way to help other people discover great content. and can relate to the the overall sen … | Continue reading
In one lecture of Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs course, a student asked Hal Abelson how the technique of deferred decision making through abstraction he taught relates to the axiom of 'do all your design before any of your code'. Given that Big Design Up Front … | Continue reading
I've just added a blogroll to my website. I've postponed this task for so long, because - as often - of my time budget didn't fit my ambition. I wanted to comment every entry, pick out my favorite article(s) for each site, find proper categories, and offer it alternatively as OPM … | Continue reading
In a recent email conversation with Manuel, I mentioned this artifact from my youth: This book was was edited, printed and marketed by a reputable German publishing house and bought by my mother in 2000. Neither production, nor purchase involved any kind of irony or hipster humor … | Continue reading
I recently wrote about the technological barriers against writing on the web. But an even bigger hurdle than technology for many potential bloggers are their own doubts. If you ask yourself, why you should write online, for you fear you won't be read, Manuel Monreale has an answe … | Continue reading
So, even though I'm using the web for more than a quarter of a century, I only recently tumbled over Bill Beaty's website Science Hobbyist. It exists since 1994 and spreads an absolutely delightful old web vibe. Consider yourself warned: you can spend quite some time in going dow … | Continue reading
At the end of last year I came across the Bring Back Blogging initiative of Ash Huang and Ryan Putnam. I think it was a terrific idea to commit to some activity on my personal website in the month of January, and apparently more than 500 other people thought so as well. The web, … | Continue reading
I am a big fan of reading websites via a feed reader. Not all websites offer one, and not all that do link it prominently. A good thing therefore is, that a standardized way to make feeds discoverable for feed readers exists. So, when I find a website that I'd like to subscribe t … | Continue reading
Many REST-APIs deal with collections of domain-specific objects. In development, it can be a tempting shortcut to create responses which directly return collections as JSON arrays. It is initially often the path of least resistance for both the creator and the consumer of the API … | Continue reading