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

    On WDRL/life in 2021

    I can’t neglect that this year, I didn’t spend much time on my beloved web development newsletter. Here are a few reasons for it… I now have a son who’s by now already 18 months old. He’s lovely and it feels so great to spend time with him and my whole family. When I work these days, I’m away from the family from early morning to late afternoon. No home office for me anymore during Summer. …
  2. as Note

    Free slots for a project during Winter

    I have some free slots left over Winter season to work on a small / mid-size website project. If you need advice or a whole website to be built, write me a mail and we’ll discuss it.
  3. as Note

    If it’s good for you and for other others—it stays.

    Nature can tell us a lot. It knows more than we ever can learn, it has more experience than we can have and it has strategies that we’ve lost in our imagination: Diversify as much as possible to ensure it works out long-term. Everyone gets their performance, everyone gets their chance. No one is asking what they did an hour or even a year ago. It doesn’t matter what they might do tomorrow or the …
  4. as Note

    Your »do better« website project

    Chances are high we don’t know each other yet if you’re reading this and it fits your needs. But that’s exactly what networking is thought for. I’m looking for small website projects to take on over the next few months. No long-term, no fulltime. I’d love to work with you if you have a project that tries to do make the world a little better. Your project might be about improving social lives …
  5. as Note

    On Work-Work Balance

    The last WDRL edition is already two months old now, and while I do have content in place for another edition the reason why I don’t send out another one currently is that I don’t have the time to fix my partially upgraded WDRL project. In January when PHP8 came out I decided to upgrade the WDRL project from Kirby 2 to Kirby 3. I knew it won’t be straight forward since I used a lot of custom code …
  6. as Note

    Another try for no Whatsapp

    So Whatsapp is updating its terms and privacy policy again. Interestingly enough, so far you can’t read that announcement outside of the app, e.g. in their official blog. And as they already tried a year ago or earlier, they now will share the data of Whatsapp with their mothership company Facebook Inc. So here I go in a try to delete Whatsapp. So far I have done it once successfully until I …
  7. as Note

    What about no Facebook?

    In my note on the try to delete Whatsapp you may wonder why not delete Facebook or Instagram? Simple, it’s necessary for my business. So yes, I have a Facebook account in order to create a Facebook page. I have an Instagram account (three in reality) to post and do marketing for my businesses. I grow and sell vegetables via my CSA and share photos of the story via Instagram. Yes, you can view …
  8. as Article

    New Website

    My website got a redesign but more importantly, I restructured the content and refocused on those people who want to know who I am and what I do for work and in my life. It’s hard to split between topics and target audiences For most people reading this article I’m known as a web developer who codes the frontends for websites. But for some people I’m known as a CSA Gardener and they want to know …
  9. as Article

    A small dot in evolution

    If we see the human species in a timeline of evolution, it’s pretty clear that 150 years are nothing, they’re a very small dot that shouldn’t stand out from the line of evolution. However, what we achieved with our way of inventing things and creating a economy system of growth in the past decades can only be described as a clearly visible dot creating not a line but a peak. How can we justify …
  10. as Note

    Don’t bend your own rules

    There’s a lot of discussion around Apple’s AppStore practices and rules right now. Not only is there a running European Union antitrust probe but also a discussion around the HEY Email app that was rejected recently due to the fact they didn’t integrate payment via Apple but only via their website. As per AppStore rules, this is forbidden. Apple states that apps need to fully work inside their …
  11. as Note

    Open Source can be a career path

    Here’s Max Stoiber telling the world how open source led his career and opened him all the job offers so far. What I didn’t knew as well is that it’s my and Dirk’s fault that Max is into coffee 😂. Watch the video, it’s pretty inspiring. Open source defined my early career as well and we all rely so much on open source that it’s worth spreading more insights about it, so thanks Honeypot for doing …
  12. as Article

    What’s up with me?

    I’ve turned pretty silent over the past months here and on Twitter. And there’s a bunch of reasons for it that I now want to share. Digital Exhaustion It started a while ago that I lost my sould for web development, for working in the whole area. At the time I was Engineering Manager for a small team at Laterpay. It was a great job, I had nice team mates but I realized that sitting in front of a …
  13. as Article

    I’m leasing my jeans

    I’m leasing my jeans. Yes, you heard right. What sounds a little bit confusing at first, is pretty interesting though. For a long time I didn’t wear jeans as I hate go to a shop and try dozens of very expensive jeans that don’t fit very well or don’t look great. Then I stumbled over MUD Jeans and decided to try one, so I bought two models, two sizes online. I ended up sending back three, one less …
  14. as Note

    Two worlds

    These days something interesting happens: We can see what’s happening if the world faces a real crisis. A virus outbreak shuffles the world around—people can’t leave their homes anymore, people buy out stores, people live in fear, stock markets close as they fall apart within hours. History is being written right now: Trading in US shares has been suspended as sharp falls led to an automatic halt …
  15. as Note

    Keep your business not neutral

    You know who else has an audience? Every. Single. Business. Nothing (but greed) prevents companies from telling us where they stand on ethical issues that affect us all. Yet, the common attitude is to ‘keep the politics out of it’. I always found that odd. I mean corporations are perhaps the single biggest influencer of politics, and yet we treat them like a holy sanctuary of neutrality. — Kai …
  16. as Article

    How we see Time

    It’s quite interesting to study and observe how we treat time in our lives. In our youth we often complain(ed) that we’re bored. Then, later in life we always feel stressed and never have enough time for anything. But this week I saw a quote that got me thinking again, triggering thoughts I had a lot before but never wrote down: If we wasted money the way we waste time, we’d all be bankrupt. — …
  17. as Article

    <code>hr</code> as styled block element

    Did you know you can style an <hr> HTML element quite a bit? If you look at the specification, it tells us that it’s an empty-content element, and it belongs to the flow-content elements. We also can see that it’s not usable with an opening and closing element so it’s used as a solitaire without end-tag. So, now we only need to know when to use an hr element: The hr element represents a …
  18. as Note

    Syncthing as Dropbox alternative

    I just read an article sharing alternatives to Dropbox and mentioning also Syncthing. Syncthing basically is an open source continuous file synchronization software. There’s one thing mentioned that I want to shortly elaborate on: … there is no server in between and this option is great for sharing and exchanging files, but not really suited for the heavy-weight job of storing stuff on a server. …
  19. as Article

    Garden in June

    It’s that time in the year again in which I spent a lot of time in my Garden. It needs care and as a reward makes me happy by showing what grows if you care about the nature. Let’s walk around in the Garden (and a bit in time as well): First strawberries are ready to crop. They’re in their second year which means they will produce much more over the next years. Broad beans flowered and are now …
  20. as Note

    Using Open Source from Giants

    Today I read a thread on Twitter about using open source software from companies that we think do not have an ethically correct business model. […] Have you ever decided NOT to use an open source package for a library/framework/tool, etc. because you did not agree ethically with the practices of the parent company developing it? […] — Monica Lent Let’s think of Palantir, author and maintainer of …