Blog, but filtered for Articles
Welcome to my writing place. You will find articles, notes and annotated links here and can subscribe to their feed once or individually.
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as article What my life looked like two years ago Computer More Computer Siting at home, doing nothing useful but being lazy and passively consuming things (TV) Occasionally going out with friends, drinking beer or something. Going a few times a year into mountains which always felt amazing but also needed a lot of self-convincement to really go out. This resulted in a breakdown of the sense of life, … -
as article This project I had in mind for over a year already. It would be my dream to build my own bed and the concept was shaped over one year until I realized that this year I would have to make that real or it would never happen. So I started getting serious about the planning, draw construction sketches and talked with several people who know more than me about wood construction. This already was an …Building a Bed
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as article Today I came across an article about a study (PDF) that found out that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of global emissions. “There is a hard limit to how much of an effect lifestyle changes alone can have.”— Baldur Bjarnason on Mastodon The source who lead me to this interesting article also mentioned there’d be a “hard limit to how much of an effect lifestyle changes alone can have”. …Does the individual matter if only 100 companies are responsible for 71% of CO2 emissions?
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as article You in business? What are you doing to last? Not to grow. Not to gain. Not to take. Not to win. But to last? —Jason Fried in Outlasting It describes the way I build software and websites since ever — building a thing that lasts for as long as I can imagine it to last. In the past, I related this to how I create a codebase so that it lasts for years and will be reliable and readable by other …Built to Last
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as article I’m a big fan of decentralized solutions and advocate for them a lot. But the claim by technologists for building decentralized services as a response to unethical behavior is wrong. If we try to solve the underlying humanitarian issue with technology, nothing changes. Decentralized services are a good idea to share responsibility and own your data. But they’re not going to prevent people from …Decentralized won’t fix unethical behavior
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as article Facebook’s Press Release after the Cambridge Analytica story unfolded is one perfect way to show how the whole company thinks. While it’s clear that Facebook didn’t follow their claim to “Protecting people’s information is the most important thing we do at Facebook.”, they declare it Cambridge Analytica’s fault that they used data that Facebook and their users gave them unnecessarily. The whole …You design your service
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as article “Trust yourself and your decision you just made.” Something I said yesterday during a meeting and only later realized the true value of it and its meaning.Trust yourself
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as article When you build something, it’s hard to decide whether it’s good enough or not to release it to the public. But improving something is even harder due to the infinity of possible solutions. This is known as the common issue of not being able to validate a change binary: A common approach to problem solving is to consider it binary. Either you’ve fixed the issue or you haven’t. Some problems fit …Making Things <strong>Better</strong>
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as article Ethical Design is a term often used by various people in the past year and now even predicted as a trend for 2018. Interestingly, when you read more about what it means you get a variety of responses. It lasts from the user experience over sustainability to business concepts. And in fact, it’s a mixture of all and cannot be a trend—instead it must be a requirement for us as human beings. When we …<strong>Ethical Design</strong> And Sustainability On The Web
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as article Today is the day for me and my colleagues Tobias and Holger. Today we launched Colloq, a new event platform for organizers, speakers and attendees. We’ve worked for over one year on it and are proud to finally have launched our service to the public. If you want the official news, you can head over and read the announcement post on the Colloq blog. Here I’m going to share a more personal view. …<strong>Colloq</strong> is there!
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as article I’m on vacation and today I worked for two hours. Yesterday for one. Before that, some minutes per day perhaps, mostly nothing. I plan to do nothing again over the next days but can’t promise. How about you — do you know the feeling of overwhelming work when you come back from vacation? Do you feel exhausted right after the first day back in office? That’s what is common to me and I want to avoid …<strong>Off Time Balance</strong>
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as article One year ago I purchased a VW T5 van with the goal of transforming the van into a camping car for my own adventures. Now I found the time to write up what I did and show you how. First of all, let me say I’m really thankful to my dad and to my best friend who both advised me so much with useful insights and tips and my dad for showing me how to manufacture the wooden interior properly. In summary …Building a custom <strong>VW Camping Car</strong>—DIY style
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as article You can use the new display: flow-root value today. It’s available in Firefox 53 and Chrome 58 which both have been released this week. And thanks to @supports, we can easily apply it already. Visit Demo on JSBin directly. Native “clearfix” Rachel Andrew has a good introductory article on the new native method to fix containers with floats inside. The new display value has only recently been …Using <code>flow-root</code> today
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as article Yesterday, the Brexit negotiations started and they are as populistic as we already would expect it from UK’s new leader Theresa May—in the end she lurked to the EU that she would exit from Europol as well if negotiations are not reaching an acceptable agreement for them. As observable already in the past few months, the British leadership is aiming to obey existing rules for an exit of a member …Brexit Negotiations, Europol And The Fear Of Missing Big Data
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as article At some point during building a new web project we will define a browser support matrix. But if we’re honest, how do we usually define this list? Developers tend to add their bias regarding old, or browsers that don’t support all modern code standards. Other people in a project prefer to look into the current web server statistics and base their decision on these numbers. Both approaches are not …<strong>The World</strong> uses the Internet (differently)
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as article On Twitter, we like to discuss the latest technologies and ideas like how to integrate CSS the best way into our web app stacks using ES6 modules. One after another ES7 feature is being pushed into browsers, and yet we tend to forget what the majority of developers need. It’s due to us living in this tiny bubble called Social Media—channels not everyone is following. When we look at what has been …The Divergence of Developers — Think out of the Box
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as article Let’s talk about vacation and time-off from your day to day job. I’m not a perfect example myself but in the last seven years working as a freelancer I’ve gotten some ideas about what my body expects from me, what my brain expects and how I need to force myself to take vacation. Some things I learned the harder way. It’s Geek Mental Health Week again but this post is not limited to “Geeks” or any …Enough Vacation — An Individual Goal
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as article First of all, I’m not going to dismiss the huge performance benefits and research concepts of AMP here. There’s a more important story here to look at: Link rot. Yesterday, I read about a story where an artist lost his entire work when Google switched off the old Blogger platform. This threw thousands of blogs into nirvana. Google announced this, but the key problem remains: If the domain itself …How <strong>AMP supercharges link rot</strong>
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as article Since quite some time I wondered why Apple’s News Bot hehaves so agressively on WDRL’s site. It creates about 20-40000 requests to my server each day. This week I finally found the reason due to this article. AppleNewsBot is incompatible with Let’s Encrypt certificates and gets more agressive when detecting that it can’t fetch the data. Apparently, this issue has been reported to Apple already …If you use <strong>Let’s Encrypt and have Apple News Bot</strong>, act now
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as article Many developers might ask why I would use a VPN or Tor network. Besides some of these networks being able to protect your privacy, they offer developers a huge other feature: Slowness and different locations to test your application and website. Check a CDN’s Cache If you use a CDN to serve your assets, you sometimes need to purge / invalidate the cache for a file. But most CDNs don’t do this …Using <strong>VPN and Tor for Web Development</strong>