The latest updates from my Journal.
A discussion about Tailwind always gets heated. It's one of those polarising topics in web dev. Tabs vs. spaces. Utilities vs. semantic CSS, decoupling vs. tight coupling, etc. I made a mistake and recommended an article today about negative aspects of Tailwind without providing further context why I agree with the article. Here are a few roughly collected points on my/our own quest with Tailwind.…
Sometimes thoughts are formed by many tiny little sparks. Yesterday, I saw Frederico Viticci’s post about how he subscribed to a Pixelfed profile in Mastodon. There’s a form of excitement in his post that seems to resonate with a lot of people who liked or boosted it. Here's one of the many beautiful things about Mastodon and the Fediverse: I saw that @johnvoorhees opened a Pixelfed profile.…
Algo, algo on the wall … My thoughts currently circle around Twitter and Mastodon a lot. The migration of hundreds of thousands of users within just a few days created an explosion of posts, articles and discussions. It also triggerd quite a bit of self-reflection. How much are we defined by our digital personas? I'm normally not a fan of the word persona as an overused buzzword from the UX world.…
Last September, we installed photovoltaic panels on our roof. We had plans for this for a couple years, but not the budget. After a bit more than a year, I wanted to write down a few numbers and thoughts for those who might be thinking about the same step. Disclaimer I'm 100% aware of our own privileges. We are home owners and we've invested thousands of euros for our solar panels (see below). We…
I joined Mastodon in 2018. It was one of many days on Twitter that felt like it’s finally enough. I don’t exactly remember why. Twitter has been my social home on the internet since 2008 and it boosted my career in many ways. I made a lot of friends there. Some online friends turned into offline friends, into friends for life. But Twitter changed over the years. I started to feel anxious whenever…
I'm on my way to Nottingham for a Kirby workshop and to attend Simon Collison's fantastic New Adventures Conference for the second time and this is my "travel diary" of a quite unusal journey. Dear diary … I've visited this conference for the first time in 2011 and it was a very special trip back then as well. Nottingham isn't that easy to reach from Germany. In 2011, the options to get there were…
It started last spring. Something didn't feel right. It was exceptionally dry for weeks. We have a 3600-liter cistern for our small garden that was already empty. It would normally fill up from time to time and get us over the summer. But not that year. What started as a long period without rain, turned into an extremely hot summer and it just didn't stop. You could see how the forest around us…
Once in a while, I have to fix small issues in very old projects. Some of my client sites from more than a decade ago are still around. One could argue that they probably should have been re-launched three times since. But it's also quite nice to enter the time machine. There are two eras of those projects: pre-built-process and and post-build-process. Whenever there's no package.json I know it's…
I killed my personal site in May 2018. It was the GDPR month of horror. Dozens of old clients approached me to help them get their privacy policies online. I was knee-deep into getting our own privacy policy for Kirby ready with our lawyer and everything just felt like shit. Instead of caring for my own site, I simply switched it off. I set up a redirect to the Kirby website, but later the SSL…
After years of hunting the perfect solution to be and stay productive, I think I finally may have found it: a bullet journal Productivity is such a huge topic and such a personal one. I was on a roller coaster over the last years. Weeks of tremendous energy, motivation and productivity were followed by weeks in deep holes without getting anything done at all. I tried all sorts of todo apps and…
I follow the battles between developer guilds for quite a while and now and then I post my own snarky remarks on Twitter about the latest JS frameworks to join the club. It's too easy to get dragged into grumpy-mode these days. Articles like the satire about How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 help to release some steam from the ever growing pressure of newer, better, faster, slicker, tools,…
There's a "startup" idea, I'm carrying with me for quite a while. This tweet by Tobias Tom convinced me to finally write a bit about it. I love audio books and I love podcasts. It's a rather young love. I'm a late-bloomer when it comes to audio content. Unfortunately I find very little time to sit down and read lately. Especially after work and spending time with the family, I am often too tired…
While being a designer/developer still feels like the most fulfilling thing I can currently imagine as a job, the last 14 years of being a freelancer in this industry brought quite some low times in which I wasn't sure if this is something I could do forever. Especially the last two years threw up a lots of doubts mostly connected to the miserable state of the web. But this weekend brought a new…
My name is Bastian and I am an addict. I confess that I spend too much time with my smart phone. More time than I actually want to spend with it. It often reminds me of my time as a smoker. In the end of my "smoking career" I smoked more unnecessary cigarettes than necessary – if you can call it that way at all. I remember how often I found myself with a cigarette in my hand that had nothing to do…
1984 is here but we move on with our daily routines. Who cares anyway? Our hard drives are manipulated: boring. Our SIM cards are being hacked: yawn. Smart TVs record private conversations and send them to a third party service for analysis: so what? Do you even remember that Snowden guy? Someone recently said to me he doesn't want to think too much about it, because he prefers to stay happy. Ok,…
I'm carrying this around with me for quite some time. Why is there no Wikipedia for news? Well, actually there is , but it's just a sad try to replicate the idea of Wikipedia and apply it to news. The biggest issue with news is trust. Which news source is in all their subjectivity the most objective one, which information is based on solid research and which is just simply made up? News publishers…
I saw the Mailbox beta launch the other day and felt this urge to get on board. I was excited like in the old days when new apps and services made me nervous like a little kid before christmas. But somewhere deep inside it didn't feel true anymore. I stopped my "early-adopter career" long ago. I sign up for new things here and there if they really seem to make sense, but after I deleted more than…
I'm working on Kirby 2 for almost two years now. It started as a small wish to make the first version a bit better and has become a major personal effort, which takes all my time and concentration. It's no longer about iterating over the first version. I'm under constant pressure to keep up with expectations. I received some really great feedback for Kirby so far and I'm afraid to fail. I once…
Just like the ebb and flow, trends in webdesign come and go. Some of them set the foundation for future trends, some are just one-hit wonders. Butterflies following the mouse, scroll effects, textures, shadows, rounded corners, bubbly buttons, bouncy animations, cards, material design — the list goes on forever. All trends follow the same path. You can feel them coming. You follow them until the…
When I started learning how to write code, I always wondered why there are thousands of books on how to get started or being a master, but nothing in between. It's a bit like those two-step How to draw… jokes, which start with a circle and end with an entire hand in step two. It seems that overcoming the intermediate state is some strange initiation ritual. It's the unwritten law of programming…