Blog

Welcome to my writing place. You will find articles, notes and annotated links here and can subscribe to their feed once or individually.

  1. as Article

    Engineering Managers, Scrum Masters & Teams

    As humans we think in silos. Scrum Masters often don’t know what an Engineering Manager is, Engineering Managers don’t care about Scrum Masters. But both have their own focus, their very own strengths to create a resilient team. See how important it is to stay open minded enough to see the benefits of other roles, no matter the job title. The concepts of a Scrum Master and an Engineering Manager …
  2. as Note

    I have two jobs, and all the social algorithms fail

    The fun part of being someone with two jobs in completely different areas. Nearly all of the algorithms of these fancy platforms backed with billions of money don’t work. LinkedIn for example is smart enough to realize both of my work categories (web development, agriculture/gardening) but fails to provide a proper feed, a mixture of network recommendations, etc. The world cannot be put in one …
  3. as Note

    [TIL] CSS :empty isn’t applicable on form fields

    Today I learned that the CSS :empty selector is implemented to look for child content (think of innerText/ innerHTML). This means it reports empty for filled form elements which are self-closing elements. Findings :empty reports empty for all form input elements because they have their values as attributes, not as inner content :empty works for <textarea> elements depending on how they’re …
  4. as Note

    [TIL] CSS :readonly is not for select fields

    Today I learned that the CSS readonly attribute for form fields does only work with input modes that allow variable user input that’s not “type-safe”: The attribute is not supported or relevant to <select> or <input> types that are already not mutable, such as checkbox and radio or cannot, by definition, start with a value, such as the file input type. range and color, as both have default …
  5. as Article

    CSS :where() :is() the difference?

    I’ve recently wrote about the usage of the universal :where() selector. Now let’s clear up when to use :where() and when :is(). For a quick repetition to what we’re talking about, see these selectors: .text :where(h2, h3, h4) {} /* vs. */ .text :is(h2, h3, h4) {} First of all, :where() and :is() both are forgiving selectors. This means that even if a selector inside isn’t supported by the browser …
  6. as Note

    CSS :where() to replace complex multi-selectors

    We all know these endless lines of CSS selectors before the real CSS rules start in the stylesheet. And while it’s not entirely new anymore, I’ve not seen it much in the wild: The usage of the universal :where() selector. So we’re coming from the following example where I want to style elements in an text article different to how the same elements are styled globally on the site. Usually you …
  7. as Article

    Is »CSS Engineer« now a job position?

    Recently, I see a few articles and people talking about “too much CSS”. Are we at the point where we will have »CSS Engineer« or »CSS Developer« positions on the job market? It would make sense and clarify things compared to »Frontend Engineer«. There are 548 properties in the CSS spec. 🤯 (…) How can we practically learn when and how to use all this? — Cory House on Twitter Sacha Greif’s article …
  8. as Note

    Cyber is still there

    When I started web development I was 12 years old. It was back in 2001, and we used HTML4 and basic CSS. The term cyber was a thing, but I never found it to be the proper term for what we are talking about: The internet, a virtual network platform for human beings. After all these years the term »cyber« is still a thing. It still sounds wrong to me personally. Whenever I read this word it …
  9. as Note

    Notes on self-hosting newsletters

    Since my subscriber list grew over two thousand people for WDRL I’m self-hosting my newsletter service instead of using a SaaS solution. But that also means a lot of work, too. Things you need to take care of when self-hosting: Choose the best newsletter software for the project Choose a service provider for actually sending the emails (e.g. AWS SES or SendGrid) Keep it up to date Choose a good …
  10. as Note

    Thanks for CSS-Tricks

    Today I read that CSS-Tricks is now part of Digital Ocean. So far, this great website was managed and built up by Chris Coyier, a nice fellow who just started this blog as a private project years ago and spent probably thousands of hours into community building and education. It’s probably the most complete learning resource for web developers out there, built up originally by just one nice …
  11. as Article

    Quick TailwindCSS Production Setup

    Here’s one more article on TailwindCSS. This time, I want to share my relatively easy setup for a fast and easy workplace. Install and set up TailwindCSS CLI We’re going to use a node.js stack and will use npm scripts for development. Hence, we start with adding our dependency: npm i --save-dev tailwindcss Now we need a command that processes our input files into a minified and optimised regular …
  12. as Article

    Film: How Farming Saved Me From Developer Burnout with Anselm Hannemann

    Last year, Ida from Honeypot came to my village twice and she made a film about my career choice and unusual paths of a developer turning into a gardener. It were great days and I’m happy I now have this piece to watch it again later in my life when I’m much older. This mini-documentary follows Anselm as he mixes development with being in nature. This is probably our most relaxing doc Honeypot …
  13. as Article

    Using Tailwind within CSS

    One thing that often gets neglected when discussing about Tailwind’s utility class approach is that it isn’t limited to that. You can use Tailwind’s directives and functions to make use of Tailwind’s presets inside your own CSS. That could go as far as writing completely your own class references and only using the styling inside your CSS file. The nice thing is that it integrates well, even from …
  14. as Article

    15 years a freelancer

    This year marks fifteen years of freelancing in my life. That’s 100% of my work life and nearly half the time I live on this world. Time to write something down. »When I was young, I challenged a lot and kickstarted my career. Of course I also failed often but combined with optimism and strategies how to succeed a project this enables my freelance business for now already fifteen years…« When I …
  15. as Article

    TailwindCSS Prototype Projects

    I’m a big fan of the paradigm “choose based on the current needs”, so when I had to prototype a recent client project on a tight budget, I made a choice that I found risky but was the best for this project: Using TailwindCSS. I know there’s quite a debate on whether TailwindCSS is cool or just a tool circumventing the technological benefits of HTML and CSS. Anyway, I chose it to be the preferred …
  16. as Note

    Mercy

    I may not understand, but I am with you. And while the original article I found this sentence may be a bit too religious for some, I think the content itself is very powerful for anyone of us. A heart of Mercy describes how we can transform other people’s lives and our own by being open-minded and trying to understand other people even if we disagree, by showing and telling mercy and empathy.
  17. as Micro

    Thank you, Tweetbot!

    At this point I want to say “thank you” to the team from Tapbots who built Tweetbot (for Mac). Without the amazing feature to mute Tweets via Regular Expressions I wouldn’t have been able to open Twitter this year. Mute filters allow me to strip out all the things that put me into negative mood while discovering new links for WDRL. One could say this is personalised Social Media. …
  18. as Micro

    How to feel gratitude as perfectionist

    Today I read an article on practicing gratitude. I read a couple of such articles already and I do irregular meditations on gratitude. Still I found this one incredibly on the point, especially as it’s focusing on people who are perfectionists. If the following sounds like you, read the full article: You might be thinking, “What exactly does this have to do with me?”. Well, chances are, if you’re …
  19. as Article

    Translating content today

    Recently, I stumbled over a problem with modern online services that’s more and more common. While in the past, services focused on providing an English language service, today most of the services offer localised versions, too. However, there are only a few that provide solid translations and a real localised service, not only a GoogleTranslated one. In October, I decided to translate my own …
  20. as Article

    It’s time for a healthy tech approach

    Disclaimer: I wrote this piece two years ago and waited for it to be published somewhere else. It never happened and I forgot about it. Yet today I see the content as still relevant and will publish it as is. Some parts may be outdated but the overall argument should be still valid. As people working in tech, we face problems everywhere every day. Five years ago we struggled most with the new …