Blog
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 Note I’d like to announce the immediate availability of The Evergreen List. It’s a hand-picked selection of resources from the weekly digests that are important for a longer time. Why does The Evergreen List exist? This additional list has been created so that people can find very important, all-time relevant content easier. You could also see this as the filter for the filtered weekly lists that only … -
as Article The key in getting the problem of data-farming by global companies right, is to make people understand what is happening right now. It’s not about Facebook and Google here — we’re right in the middle of a whole generation that is unable to cope with the topic of privacy. With the super-fast growing world of digitalisation and artificial intelligence, users cannot grasp the impact of it to our …<strong>The Responsibility Mindset</strong> With Artificial Intelligence
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as Note I long hesitated to comment on the “CSS Modules” tool, but seeing an article on CSS-Tricks about it, in it some fundamentally flawed assumptions and arguments, I want to shortly add some thoughts to it. CSS Modules takes a different approach. Instead of writing plain HTML, we need to write all of our markup in a JavaScript file, like index.js. This is the first and main issue I have with the …On “What are CSS Modules and why do we need them?”
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as Note Last week, Cloudflare published an article headlined with “The Trouble with Tor”. The whole post was caused by protesters who complained about Cloudflare’s strict Tor policy. The default setting for user’s sites is to ‘block’ Tor traffic and ask people to solve a Google Captcha. While this is not blocking access to a site in a traditional way for most people, it is indeed a complete block for …On Cloudflare’s “The Trouble with Tor”
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as Note For me, 2015 has been quiet regarding conferences I attended. After years with many events I needed a break from seeing all the same things over and over again (which is only a bad thing when you attend too many events). TEDx Munich In November, I attended TEDx Munich and it was amazing. They achieved a great mix of speakers, very good diversity (speakers, attendees) and after a every two to …Notes On My Conference Year 2015
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as Article Recently, Service Workers made quite some noise and people encourage to use this very newest technology on every website. But when I looked at the implementation and specification, I ended up having more questions than answers to it. Note: This post is not a rant about Service Workers. I believe they are a great technology and help us as developers creating better services. This is just an …Open Service Worker Questions
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as Article I often hear from developers that they use Cloudflare to secure their sites. The service acts as a CDN and DDoS protection and offers free HTTPS for your website. The only thing you need to do is moving your domain’s DNS servers to Cloudflare’s. But this isn’t the whole truth. Note that this isn’t a particular problem of Cloudflare but a disclosure of a common misapprehension of their service. …Why You Should <strong>Choose Your Own HTTPS</strong>.
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as Article With Firefox 43 we have the possibility to natively disable known trackers. With the new privacy protection mode you can do more than you think. An experiment worth trying. I’ve been experimenting quite a lot with Firefox’ new tracking protection recently. It revealed some quite interesting things about where we’re at in the web. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as you might think and here’s why. …See The <strong>Progress</strong>
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as Note Last week I read a few things about saving energy. It turns out that our consumer behavior is broken. It’s not reasonable to replace your old TV with a new one to save energy. Because you’re not. Your old one needs to be recycled. But instead it’s sent to Africa where people suffer from tearing down the toxic material in it. “Don’t buy more than what you need. Fast fashion consumption is not …Consumer Behavior
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as Note I stumbled over the event just two weeks ago. The TEDx Munich 2015 which had the title “Hidden Treasures”. Until now, I only have known TED talks from videos and I have seen extraordinarily great ones over the past years. Curious but knowing how much TED Events cost, I read that the independently organized Munich event was only 140EUR for the ticket. Not knowing a single speaker made me to …TEDx Munich 2015
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as Note A few months ago I finally implemented Stripe as donation platform for WDRL with the help of my friend Tobias Tom. This is a short story on how it turned out to be an awful experience. I already started an attempt to implement Stripe when they released their cool checkout.js product. What I didn’t realize back then, and only found out by accident, is that while it’s super easy to implement the …Notes on Stripe
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as Article I recently researched font loading again as I wanted to use a local copy of a font and serve it as fast and smooth as possible. This is a quite different approach to when you use TypeKit or Google fonts and their simple copy/paste snippets… Over the past months there have been a few articles taking care of different font loading optimization techniques. Reading all of them, I ran into a few other …<strong>Using Web Fonts</strong> The Best Way (in 2015).
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as Article We all know the discussions about Apple’s Safari browser. And while the one party is saying “it’s the new Internet Explorer”, others counter state “it’s the user centric web”. I don’t fully agree with both parties. It’s the new IE Well, I can’t say that sentence is entirely wrong. With Apple’s engineers hiding all their development from the public and several occurrences where Apple invents their …Safari isn’t the new IE but it’s also not user centric
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as Article Today I switched my website from GitHub Pages and Cloudflare back to my own servers. It wasn’t that hard but there are also some drawbacks I want to report. Reasons for Switching It’s super easy to set up github pages and as they have ruby installed it’s even easier to run your Jekyll based site on it. You can also add custom domains to it which I did. At some point in the past years I wanted to …Performance is King but so is Privacy and Data Ownership
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as Article Usually I am the one who says ‘Let the developer change every default browser behaviour’. Except, there are behaviours that, when customised, can hurt the user’s experience more than a custom behaviour could help. Such a case is custom scrolling. In the past week I visited a lot of different websites. Not the usual web development websites that I visit all the time but very different normal …Native Scrolling
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as Article Lately, WDRL for me has not only been a way to curate and share the best links in web development but also a way to write things that are important for me. It’s a great feeling when I send out my thoughts on the list (usually in the introduction) and get heart-warming replies from my readers. What started out as a simple bullet point list on my blog now is a hand written letter with still some …A Channel To Write.
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as Article It’s cool to be trendy and it’s cool to bash other people and products. Wait, what? It isn’t cool to harass people, it isn’t cool to fight with other persons. We need to be smarter in the ways we communicate with each other. Today showed it again. Addendum / Note: I’m not on either side in the following example. It just shows a hopefully neutral view on how different persons deal with others. …Don’t fight but start supporting each other
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as Article I always read W3C or WHATWG bashings. I even wrote one myself. I’m (better should say was as I’m not very active at the moment) part of the RICG, a movement that tried and successfully managed to get the first developer based need into an official webstandard. And the RICG started because W3C and WHATWG failed to understand our needs. Note: The following paragraphs are my opinion and my …Lessons learned pushing a new webstandard and how important it is to stay classy.
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as Article 2014 is over now and as in the past year I want to recap the past year and reflect what happened. Note: This is a personal article and there’s at least no technical take away in here. 2014 started with a big change. In December 2013 I said ‘yes’ to my biggest project yet in my career and I started January, 6th, in my new team. This included moving from Munich to Cologne for what I thought would …My 2014 in recap
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as Article I recently questioned myself a lot how to grow WDRL and make this non-profit side project a bit more sustainable. At the end of 2014, 1 ½ years after its foundation I want to share a little bit more about it. But first, I want to thank all my supporters, readers and all the people who wrote the stuff I’m linking to each week. You’re all amazing! I wanted to change something A few months …Towards a more sustainable WDRL