Software engineering, Entrepreneurship, Music
I don’t go to many conferences these days. Between the “AI is eating the world” keynotes and the vendor booths with free socks, the signal-to-noise ratio can get rough. But Applied AI Conf felt different on paper — smaller, more practitioner-focused, the kind of event where someone might actually show code. So I went. I work as an SRE at deepset.ai, where I’m currently in the middle of replacing…
If you’re running Crossplane in production and your version is more than a couple of minor releases behind - this post is your gentle nudge to go upgrade it. Right now 🙈 Before it becomes what it became for me: a week-long odyssey through undocumented breaking changes, phantom resources, and two controllers stuck in an endless argument over an empty list. The starting point We were running…
This morning I was poking at my phone and suddenly realized: How do the push notifications actually work??? Does the server know my phone’s public IP? Does the phone poll every second? Is every app keeping its own connection open? I had no answers. So I went down the rabbit hole — at least the networking side — and here’s the short version of what I learned. Polling? Websocket? Nope, it’s not iOS…
As a DevOps engineer, I’m always looking for ways to automate repetitive tasks. Recently, I stumbled upon a perfect use case: hunting for a Teenage Engineering OP-1 synthesizer on eBay Kleinanzeigen. These funny music devices rarely drop below €500, and finding one in good condition near Berlin requires constantly checking listings. Instead of manually refreshing the page every few hours, I…
Introduction In any application, there is a need to monitor various signals to ensure the stability and reliability of the application. Logs are one of the sources for such signals. Although they are not usually used for monitoring, they are crucial for understanding when something goes wrong. Fluent Bit is an open-source log processor and forwarder, part of the Fluentd ecosystem, designed to…
History of my blog and my writing motivation If you’re looking for the technical part of this post, please scroll down to the “Technical” section. This blog has been with me for almost a decade, however, if you glance at the timestamps on this blog, you’ll notice that I haven’t written for a few years. I’ve recently cleaned up the oldest posts, but nevertheless, it still reflects my career path,…
I have contributed to several open-source projects throughout my career, but there is one in particular that I hold in high regard. This Terraform provider was developed during my work at Babbel, and we made the decision to open-source it. Impressively, it has been recognized and listed on the official Terraform community providers page. For a comprehensive announcement and a detailed article…
Dear readers, in this post, I will not delve into highly technical topics. However, the subject I am going to discuss is crucial for many engineers: customer centricity. This concept has two primary advantages. Firstly, adopting a customer-centric approach ensures that your efforts significantly positively impact the product. Secondly, it often leads to receiving valuable positive feedback from…
Today, we’ll dive into the enhancements we’ve recently implemented in the staging environment at Babbel. If you’re an engineer, you’re likely familiar with the concept of a staging environment. Nevertheless, I’ll start with a concise definition to ensure we’re all on the same page before exploring how to fortify a staging environment. Please stay with me. Regrettably, the full content of this post…
How are you doing, fellow developers? Ready to dockerize your first application? Or what about finding out, what “dockerize” actually means? Let’s start! The structure of today’s post will be the following: Understanding the Virtualization How containers are different from Virtual Machines Introduction to Docker concepts Virtualization Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash The idea of containers is not…