How It All Started My entry into programming was at 16, when friend came over to my house and told me about one of our neighbours, who was building websites, and even selling them (can you believe that?!) to small businesses. We looked at the websites and thought: We can do that better. The way I entered the field might be how I always act, or it defined how I approach this craft: I want to build…
A local-first digital notebook A bit more than a week ago, I came across the blog post Using an engineering notebook . I personally love notebooks and use... too many of them. My only issue has always been that when my brain is on fire, my handwriting is not neat enough, it's not structured enough, and it helps me to note things down, but it always feels like I could be faster by text-to-speech or…
AdGuard Home For quite a while now I have been blocking every* ad in my home on a router level (* some ads obviously slip through, and also YouTube ads cannot be blocked on a DNS level). I remember having a very low powered virtual server running for some Linux server experimentations at the time, and I wanted to make better use of it. I knew of Pi-hole but this seemed so much work to setup. This…
This blog post should serve as a time capsule for my future self. How was it like serving the Internet in 2026? What is my set up, my most visitied bookmarks, websites I frequently go to? Let's find out. Hardware excursion For the very first time, I cleanly separated my work (MacBook Pro M3 Pro) and my private digital life (Framework AMD 13" with Arch + COSMIC). I deinstalled all work related apps…
There was a time, probably around 2012 (13 years ago) where I was hoping, wishing Apple would do better: MobileMe . I was in university, and was writing for the German Macworld ( Macwelt ) at the time. Dropbox was gaining more popularity, and the phone wars were just heating up. In my mind, it would have been a dream to have a proper, built-in cloud storage so I didn't have to manually sync my…
I thought about "What makes a "good" engineer" for a long time, and probably will until my death bed. In the day to day, it's sometimes hard to figure out: Did I do a good job? For the technical aspect of my day to day work, I printed own my own "Non Negotiables" (inspired by The Bear ), and put it next to my desk on the wall. I aim to follow them. Here they are: Understand the problem/feature to…
This article is part of a chapter of Rust Web Development which didn't make the cut to be in the book. TL;DR When we talk about a web service, we, more often than not, mean deployed code which listens on a certain IP address and port and responds to HTTP messages. There are many steps involved for two parties to be able to communicate with each other. Application developers are mainly confronted…