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Ever since I started highlighting text on my Kindle, then my PocketBook, and also the old-fashioned way with pen and paper, I have been trying to store those highlights in my digital garden — which serves as a second brain for recalling insights from books I have read. I built brainfck.org to keep my collection of notes available online, not only for myself but also for others. I even added a…
I’ve been using Claude for almost two years now, and about six months ago I switched completely to claude-code for most coding activities. I was initially using gptel and ellama, but at some point I came across claude-code.el, which allowed me to smoothly integrate Claude Code into Emacs. In this post I’ll share my customizations — yes, most of them were generated by Claude. Setup #…
Update 2026-04-17: A Reddit comment pointed out a cleaner approach: instead of advising ghub--token directly, you can register a proper auth-source backend. This way any package that uses auth-source (not just ghub/forge) benefits automatically. Both approaches are documented below. Forge requires a GitHub token stored in ~/.authinfo or ~/.netrc. For GitHub Enterprise (e.g., corporate instances),…
This is a collection of book summaries for the books I read during April-December 2025. Politics # 📚 Baustellen der Nation # Philip Banse & Ulf Buermeyer — Goodreads • Notes This book is about construction sites (German: “Baustellen”) of the nation in Germany. It covers different aspects of what works well in Germany and what doesn’t. Among the construction sites you’ll…
Although it has been a while since my last post here, I don’t want to break with the tradition of doing my annual review (make sure to check out the previous years: 2021, 2023, 2024). Coming back to writing again feels like something I should have done months ago, but hey, it’s never too late. I used to have this habit of writing, especially in the morning, but this year most of the…
There is certainly some frustration with productivity tools that feel more like a burden than a boost. During my career I’ve tried different digital planners, time-blocking apps, task managers, only to find myself overhelmed by their complexity and not really matching my personal workflow. The truth is, the tools are not the problem: it’s how we use them. Instead of adopting new tools,…
Every PKMS/BASB needs a search functionality. Ever since I’ve created brainfck to host my own collection of thoughts/ideas/resources (aka Zettelkasten) I wanted to be able to actually search within my collection of org-roam based notes. Meanwhile for all my sites I own (this blog, my CV/portfolio, brainfck and defersec) I use hugo. All of them didn’t have proper search capabilities.…
Continuing with my tradition of quarterly book summaries, here are my reflections on the books I’ve read between January and March this year. Politics # 📚 Tyranny of the Minority # 👉 Tyranny of the Minority by Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt At the beginning the title seemed very strange to me since my first thought was: “How can a minority overrule the majority?” As the…
Continuing with my tradition of quarterly book summaries, here are my reflections on the books I’ve read between October and December last year. Biographies # 📚 Elon Musk # 👉 Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson I must admit I’m definitely not a fan of Elon Musk and had some curiosity to learn more about the person behind the public façade. I wanted to learn more about all the aspects that…
As another year comes to an end, it’s time for my annual review (check out 2021, 2023) - a tradition where I reflect on the past twelve months, examining what I’ve learned, how I’ve grown, and whether I’ve managed to stick to my goals. These reviews serve as a personal chronicle but also a way to share experiences that might resonate with others on similar journeys. 2024…
Introduction # Since I’ve started developing in Golang I didn’t really use the debugger. Instead I was naively adding fmt.Print statements everywhere to validate my code 🙈. While print statements and logs might be also your first debugging instinct, they often fall short when dealing with large and complex code base, with sophisticated runtime behaviour and (of course!) complex…
Keeping with the theme I’ve started a few months ago, here are my own book summaries for the books I’ve read between May and September this year. Social Sciences and Psychology # 📚 Lost Connections # 👉 Lost Connections - Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari After reading The Lonely Century last year, which opened my eyes to the…
In the midst of the Corona pandemic back in 2021, I joined the team at Cashlink, a company focused on tokenization and digital securities. You can also check out their whitepaper and learn more here. With little understanding of these concepts, I embarked on this new journey as a Senior Security Engineer within the TECH team. Promised a greenfield environment, I stepped into the unknown, excited…
Inspired by Eli Bendersky’s book reviews, here are my summaries for the books I’ve read between January and April 2024. 📚 Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant I’ve received this book shortly after reading The Scout Mindset where I learned about the soldier vs scout mindset where the later one can be shortly described in one quote: “Your…
Why vanilla? # Let’s start with the most obvious question: What’s wrong with Doom Emacs? Short answer: There is nothing wrong with Doom Emacs. I still use it and I still recommend it for beginners. Some years ago I started with Spacemacs and moved to Doom which, in my humble opinion, is far faster and more stable. So if you’re a novice and just entered the “church of…
I feel somewhat ashamed for not doing a review last year. However, this year I have set aside some time to reflect on the highlights of this year, what I have learned, the habits I have changed, and the habits I have stucked to. The following is my review for 2023, divided into several sections. Books # This year I’ve finally reactivated my Goodreads profile primarily for getting book…
Introduction # In the last post, I’ve used PlantUML to draw things like groups, accounts, and clusters. However, I didn’t focus on how different parts inside the business layer interact (usually components related to the main application/system relevant for your business). Now, we’ll use a DSL Domain-Specific Language specific for this use case to show these interactions between…
A few days ago I came across Cal Newport’s episode on “The failure of Cybernetic Productivity " where he talked about a term I’ve never heard before: Cybernetic Productivity. This productivity concept has been prominent since the early 2000s and has served as an effective strategy for managing the growing workload, particularly among knowledge workers . Now, let’s delve…
I regularly listen to the podcast Lage der Nation which offers transcripts to premium subscribers on their website plus.ladernation.org. To export quotes from a recent episode and add them to my private knowledge database, I followed these steps: I activated the developer console in my browser. In the network tab of the console, I saw a GET request to a URL like…
Basics # I’ve become a huge fan of PlantUML even before I came across the concept of “documentation as code” I also code for presentations. So the term presentation as code is also a thing. and it instantly won me over with its capabilities. I have used it in many different roles (software engineer, security engineer, security architect) extensively to draw diagrams (components,…
Introduction # As a Security Architect, my role encompasses reviewing existing architectures as well as designing brand new ones from scratch. The opportunity to apply Security principles during the design phase and develop an entirely new infrastructure with Security as the core focus is truly exceptional. Designing a secure cloud architecture is not only vital for achieving scalability,…
The stage for the keynote Introduction # During this year’s keynote, the main focus was on the velocity companies - and especially start-ups - need in order to bring their products to the market, highlighting the importance of agility. I was particularly surprised to learn that Flixbus is fully managing their infrastructure in AWS, showcasing the power and potential of cloud technologies.…
Motivation # Usually when I consume my daily news feeds, I prefer to keep context switching to a minimum. Whether you’re a busy professional or just someone who values their time, you might want to streamline your online reading experience as much as possible. For me, this means sticking to Emacs and using tools like elfeed and pocket-reader to stay on top of my reading list. Unfortunately,…
Motivation # CDK is a great framework by AWS that allows you to define cloud infrastructure as code (IaC). You can use your favourite programming language such as TypeScript, Python, Java, Golang to define your resources. This feature is particularly convenient as it automates the generation of CloudFormation templates in a readable and more manageable way. However, not every AWS resource can be…
I must admit “Fooled by Randomness” was a hard to digest food for my brain. I had the same feeling while I was reading Thinking: Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. What do these books have in common? They both deal with human behavior, probability, stochastics, heuristics. These are concepts for which humans don’t necessarily have a born ability to understand and to deal with.…
Imagine you’d ask an oracle (like the one in the Matrix movie) how much time left you have on this planet before the inevitable takes place - you die. Suppose she/he/it Who knows, maybe some day OpenAI will also answer these kind of questions will tell you at the age of 80 years your life will come to an end. In my case this means I still have 80 - 34 = 46 years to go.
Do you feel invisible when you’re in the city and everybody just walks by without any eye contact, completely ignoring your existence? Are you already suffering from Zoom fatigue and sick of meeting your colleagues in a virtual environment? Or maybe you’re lucky enough and do have an office but everybody headphones while moving from A to B, signaling (fake) busyness and some sort of…
More than a year ago I started working on a side project born out of the furstration I had with buffer, ifttt and zapier. The use case was pretty simple: I just wanted to share an article and some comments about it on multiple social media platforms from a single location. All sharing services had great functionalities (e.g. automated workflows) Initially I played with RSS and hugo for publishing…
Ten years ago, in December 2012, I have officially Before that I had several student jobs and internships which at least from most recruiters view don’t count in as professional experience. started my career in the (Information) Security industry. During this period I have done pentesting, code reviews, architecture reviews, software engineering, reverse engineering, consultancy, secure…
What do have clean, layered, hexagonal hexagonal, onion architecture and ports & adapters in common? They kind of share the same principles: Separation of concerns (business vs infrastructure code), data encapsulation (information hiding), low coupling, strict dependency flow (how layers should depend on other ones). Still these concepts are not easy to digest unless you put them into practice.…
In the first part of this series I’ve outlined the main factors for moving my digital garden / braindump / Zettelkasten to org-roam and which factors have facilitated this decision. In the 2nd part I will expand more how I’ve built the new brainfck.org using hugo, ox-hugo and org-roam. Extracting tiddlers from my Tiddlywiki setup was only the first step towards a Second Brain using…
In my previous post I’ve writen about knowledge work and how its output cannot be measured in a linear manner. For knowledge workers information is their most valuable capital, yet everyone is desperately looking for a system to manage the continous influx of information pouring into their brains. We spend a tremendous amount of time managing huge amounts of information and searching for the…
I’ve recently stumbled over this wired article [1] where the benefits and drawbacks of having a 4-day work week were conclued from scientific research and “experiments” done in the field. Seems like there is a momentum recently as more companies (but also governments) around the world explore the benefits of the 4-day work week: 𝘓𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘴𝘶𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳, 𝘜𝘚…
In the first part of this series I’ll outline the main factors why I’ve decided to move my digital garden / braindump / Zettelkasten to org-roam and which factors have facilitated this decision. In the 2nd part (still work in progress) I will expand more how I’ve built the new brainfck.org using hugo, ox-hugo and org-roam. Motivation # I’ve been using Tiddlywiki for almost…
Summary # Figure 1: “Building Microservices (2nd edition)” along my notes During my overall IT carreer I came across different architectural design patterns where oppinions differ on the question if they’re the right ones for the problems/challanges teams are dealing with. Before reading this book I was familiar with some of the microservices concepts but it was some article (on…
Since my last post on reddit asking for some help regarding Emacs and TiddlyWikis REST API I gained some elisp knowledge I’d like to share. Maybe you want to go directly to the Emacs configuration. TiddlyWiki 5 # For those of you who haven’t heard of TiddlyWiki yet: TiddlyWiki is a personal wiki and a non-linear notebook for organising and sharing complex information. It is an…
In my last post I wrote about RSS/Atom and how these technologies can be used to declutter your digital life and reduce your exposure to the attention economy. Emacs (and all the amazing packages) taught me ORG mode, some basic Elisp and how to be a minimalist and use just one tool for almost everything. Staying up-to-date with current technological trends, Security advisories, blog posts from…
Digital Minimalism # A few days after I have started working on this post, I begun reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism book and quickly realized how both topics interrelate to each other. But now one by one: Digital minimalism is a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your entire time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities to strongly support things…
Back in 2017 I remember people sitting together and doing pre-workout breathwork before some trainig session (Calisthenics). At that time I didn’t know what it was nor what it was good for. One year later I was introduced to Pranayama as part of my Yoga teacher training. Right after I’ve read Conscious Breathing but I didn’t really catch fire on the topic. In 2020 I finally came…
Figure 1: Digital Minimalism: I’ve started with the audio book but then I ordered a physical copy for further reading. It started with the audio book but soon I’ve realized there is so much valuable content in it I cannot extract by just seeking forward and backward. Finally I’ve ordered a physical copy so I can dedicate even more time digesting the content and putting everything…
Last year I’ve done some experiments with the Beamer LaTex class which you can use whenever you want to export an ORG document to a Beamer presentation. I’ve done some customizations and I’ve thought I have a quite decent presentation template. Till I’ve found this. That reveal.js presentation completely my mind and I’ve started digging into asciidoc. And then there…
After last year’s pandemic shock, this year has brought more hope and motivation to people. I’ve felt motivated to learn new things, deep-dive into unknown areas and finally change some things in my life. In this post I’ll share with you my most valued (software) tools, productivity tips, some books worth reading and finally some failure and success with regards to my habits.…
I always use to say: “Software currently rules the world.” Almost every aspect in our (digital) life has to do with software: The apps you use on your smartphone, the mail/hosting services you rely on, online shopping, train tickets, in general everything that somehow adds value to your life. Competition among organizations is driven by speed, the ability to deliver new features to the…
Bye Bye Scout24! I guess it’s become a tradition to write bye bye posts whenever I switch jobs. So this happens again as I’ve decided to pursue new opportunities elsewhere. I feel sad but also excited at the same time. Working for 5 years for the same company (I do know that’s not thaaaat long) feels like I’ve spent half of my life there. Since 2016 many colleagues have…
After finishing my last post on how to convert getpocket links to epub I was thinking a lot about my current workflow, how I manage to capture everything that might be interesting for me and save it for later use. Saving web articles for later reading is not a big deal but dealing with the amount of saved articles requires some management skills. In this post I’ll share some best practices…
Read, organize, archive # I heavily use getpocket to collect articles and save them for later reading. While on my mobile devices I use the official app, on my desktop systems (mostly tmux + Emacs) I use pocket-reader.el quite heavily to collect/organize/archive my list of articles. After my transition from Spacemacs to Doom Emacs I still love evil mode and like to do most of the stuff in normal…
[Update 2021-06-22] If you’re more interested in the Tiddlywiki aspect of this post you can also check this Tiddlywiki Google Groups thread. [Update 2021-06-18] This post caught some attention on this Hackernews thread. You might want to check the comments. Based on the recommendations in the thread I’ve put together a list of (digital) solutions (besides the preferred ones) Almost 6…
Introduction # With the recent success of Github actions you can automate lots of things whenever something in your repos changes, e.g. automatically generate static HTML content (using hugo) and push it to some repository for which GitHub Pages has been configured. Check this awesome actions list for more use cases. Using encrypted secrets defined either per repository or organization, you can…
Hello from the other side # If you read this post today you might have noticed there was a huge break since the last post. More than 4 years ago I was actively blogging about security (mostly offensive stuff) and appsec. So what happened since then? Well not only in private some things have changed but also professionally I kind of switched sides. While being involved in pentests for a while I…
After reading this excellent article I’ve found this page. If you scroll down you’ll find the Apply section. Not that I wanted to apply for some job but I thought, it’d be challenging to find out the mail address: well, the email address is hidden below. Find the email and send your resume, solution walk-through and desired role. Let’s have a look at the message: 1 2 3 4 5…