Blog, but filtered for Articles

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  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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
  6. 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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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. …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
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    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 …
  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 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 …
  19. as article

    穀雨 (Kokū)

    We all are used to see the negative things in life. We can nearly always complain about the weather; It’s either too hot, too cold, too windy, raining the whole summer or snowing again since months now. It seems weather can’t make it right for us and yet we spend most of the days in our offices, in our flats, ignoring the little details of life. Living in cities, most of us don’t need to know if …
  20. as article

    Hope in the Dark Forest

    Imagine a dark forest at night. It’s deathly quiet. Nothing moves. Nothing stirs. This could lead one to assume that the forest is devoid of life. But of course, it’s not. The dark forest is full of life. It’s quiet because night is when the predators come out. To survive, the animals stay silent. (…) This is also what the internet is becoming: a dark forest. — Yancey Strickler Last week, an …