Archive

2024

A small lecture I gave on how to approach designing the software architecture for a cellular IoT project.

2023

an ad-hoc tech talk about an inspirational Twitter account

Use teamstatus.space to collect project status updates asynchronously and distributed to speed up your sync meetings

My approach to testing embedded firmware using real hardware.

Your event’s Code of Conduct extends beyond the event and it’s digital spaces

A review of BoosterConf 2023 in Bergen

I support the leadership of CreaTech Motives Afrika as a technical advisor as part of their advisory board.

After three years volunteering for DistributeAid I felt it no longer was a good way to spend my time

2022

A look back at this years Øredev in Malmö; one of the best for-profit tech conferences I have attended so far

This is a small snipped that clones all repositories of a GitHub team

Elon Musk is now in full control of a powerful network, that I am part of; but that is not the biggest issue.

The unconference, re-invented for inclusiveness.

In order to ensure that the outputs of your CloudFormation Stacks are typed properly, you can use this technique.

This document provides a code of conduct for these account Takeovers in order to enable the employee, the social media team, and the followers to have meaningful and positive interactions.

While the book was published in 2010 and some of its contents have not aged well, it still provides a lot of things to learn. In this post I will give my recommendations on which sections are a must read, and which ones can be skipped in case you are-like me-not very fond of Java and XML.

My approach to testing embedded firmware using real hardware.

I had the opportunity to attend the Nordic Testing Days in Tallinn for three days and I had a blast.

In this video I am explaining the one thing that I have been doing basically my entire career to keep up to date with the IT industry.

I was interviewed by Mergify about my use of their service.

In this post I introduce myself for a DistributeAid contributor spotlight and talk about the work I do for the non-profit.

An NTNU guest lecture on serverless and IoT and why they are a great match.

The 5 whys method is so powerful because of its simplicity ... but be careful not to come across as annoying when applying it. Showing persistence in uncovering fundamental truths about a thing takes practice, but always delivers.

The way to move quickly is to focus on adding value, not packaging it.

A reflection on my principles is not possible without acknowledging my privileges.

In 2022 I am turning 42 and therefore I am writing down my 42 first principles.

2021

You may prioritize improving your technical skills, but why is improving your communication skills just as important?

An indepth guide for software teams to engage all stakeholders in creating up-to-date documentation that drives tests

Virtual conferences do not get any better than this one.

When using NPM v7 to package lambdas using AWS SKD v3 it leads to unnecessary large deployment pacakges.

Notes on migrating Bifravst to the completely rewritten AWS SDK for JavaScript/TypeScript

2020

I am mentoring students and I gave them a README for my weekly office hour.

I am participating in AOC again

I am mentoring 4 teams from the Philippines

This is a webinar for everyone who wants to get an introduction to protocols to consider when developing a cellular IoT product.

resources.distributeaid.org provides a browser-friendly UI for a Google Drive folder.

Great for remote conferences!

It's now even more important to keep in touch in these times of crisis and uncertainties.

What happens at European Testing Conference must not stay at European Testing Conference.

2019

A subtle way to hack your community.

How I experienced JSCraftCamp and my key take-a-aways.

Podio discloses extensive user information and claims its users have agreed to it.

In this talk I will take you through the challenge of testing a cloud-native application. I will cover the challenges when developing solutions on top of serverless components which you cannot run on your own machine and how I designed a BDD driven approach to run the integration tests.

The latest (and greatest?) way I could come up to publish AWS Lambdas written in TypeScript.

I am getting more and more convinced that classes in JavaScript or TypeScript are an anti-pattern. At least in the way I use them.

At 2019's Global Diversity CFP Day I gave a lightning talk about Call for Proposals.

Do you always have temp / scratch files lying around in your Git repo and sometimes accidentally commit them (like I do)? Here is a simple fix!

2018

Extracts of a panel on backend languages at code.talks Hamburg 2018.

This is a recording of my 2018 talk on prototyping products for the Internet of Things using JavaScript

My segment on why YOU should propose a talk to a conference NOW! from J On The Beach 2018

I was interviewed after my talk about Prototyping products for the Internet of Things using JavaScript

How can we share the gut feeling we use when writing software?

I was a Conference Buddy at SoCraTes 2018—but nobody needed one.

After a year of absence, I went back to Soltau for SoCraTes 2018 and discovered that the best conference ever got even better—thanks to fantastic diversity efforts.

When building connected products, it will never be only the hardware which makes for a successful product. The IoT Tiles Toolkit cards are a fantastic support tool for generating ideas and even possible solutions.

About my experience relocating to Trondheim, Norway.

In this post I will explain how you can automate releasing of your JavaScript libraries to npm.

A critique of the book Code Craft by Pete Goodliffe

Value Types are are used to enable runtime validation of parameters. This provides a simple and expressive way to ensure their validity and convey their semantic meaning in code at the same time while making this transparent for the caller.

End of May I had the opportunity to fly to Malaga in Spain and speak at J on the Beach.

This week I flew to one of the biggest developer conference in Scandinavia: NDC { Oslo }.

You can now run Greenkeeper with lockfile support on AWS CodeBuild.

Follow this one weird trick to become a Certified Software Crafter

A retrospective on what I learned during the European Testing Conference 2018 in Amsterdam

Despite its excess Uncle Bob Grandeur and idiotic and pointless cartoons I would recommend this book to experienced architects and software developers since it reinforces and clarifies proven concepts, which I am using on a daily basis.

Introducing Beginners to Test-Driven-Development in JavaScript

2017

Can we have space for people whose energy is drained by all the interaction that is promoted in all agile methods?

As Scott Adams put it very well: Humans are liars. How do we create an environment where they don't?

Week 45 of 2017 in review

Week 44 of 2017 in review

My recommendations on how to build a professional network if you are early in your career.

Use .toBeWithin() when you want to check that a number is within a range.

Week 43 of 2017 in review

Some resources to get you started with React.

Week 42 of 2017 in review

Week 41 of 2017 in review

Week 40 of 2017 in review

Week 39 of 2017 in review

Week 39 of 2017 in review

Week 38 of 2017 in review

Week 36 of 2017 in review

Week 35 of 2017 in review

Week 34 of 2017 in review

Week 33 of 2017 in review

Having juniors in a remote team is a challenge, but you still can make it work.

I was interviewed during the DeveloperCamp 2017 about BarCamps.

In this post I will explain the way I design the process that supports one key operation in every startup: improving the technology which delivers value to customers—or should, if you are working towards signing your first customer.

Not matter which tool you use to communicate, one of the most important actions to tackle communication chaos is defining a communication policy.

In this post series I'll reflect on the technical principles that I've employed in the last 5 years working as a CTO to achieve something that would have been seen as futile and insane a decade ago, but is the norm today: running software in production that is neither complete nor well-designed and needs to evolve every day.

I hate offices. But how many interior designers have I heard of, that are coders, too? Let me take you through my dream office!

As a newbie you have something to contribute to a conference as well!

I realized that there is a full-stack developer trap: your work is evaluated based on your best skill, which unfulfillable expectations.

Lean Mindset by Mary and Tom Poppendieck is a concise handbook for building then next generation of software company; which must be product company.

These are the notes I took for my company Slack during TopConf Linz 2017.

About codefreeze, the software craft and testing conference in the arctic circle

2016

Asking your employees to think different for a better goal and simultaneously forcing them to follow the old, left-side methods, which the right-side is trying to get rid of, is nothing but insanity.

Salary is probably one of the most dreadful topics, especially because it is a hygiene factor: earning *not enough* money will affect your satisfaction greatly, but earning more than you need won't improve your performance equally strong.

The workbook to implement intent-based leadership in your organization is as concrete as it gets for books that promise changing your organization for the better.

Ricardo Semler debunks an illusion: the idea that you can plan for the future.

Impressions from the Agile Cologne XXL 2016

Book review of An Everyone Culture by Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey

I recently proposed to establish a Code of Conduct for the BarCamp RheinMain. Here is my rationale why.

This post tries to provide an entry point for newcomers to Frankfurt

Book review of Womit ich nie gerechnet habe by Götz W. Werner. I recommend this book to everyone who is facing problems like high turnover rates, inefficiency due to bureaucracy and incompetence or is, like me, interested in alternative operating-systems for organizations.

Book review of The Hard Things About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Book review of Unboss by Lars Kolind and Jacob Bøtter

Sometimes it can be useful to rotate a screen, e.g. to have one display in portrait. This command will rotate your screen:

When developing stateless microservices it can be tedious to set up the correct environment variables. You can teach your bash/zsh to load them on a per directory basis.

Book review of Daring Greatly by Brené Brown

Impressions from my first tech conference as a speaker.

This is not so easy as it sounds: because we are pushing out updates to our products every day, a natural date to celebrate does no longer manifest itself. As a manager we have to take care of this, too.

The second most important challenge is ensure that the few occasions you will spend face-to-face with your colleagues is quality time. Here is how to achieve this.

The most important challenge when working in distributed teams is the missing watercooler. Here is how to fix it.

This post series is a summary of my talk about the challenges working in remote teams and how I dealt with them.

I use the (developer) happiness questionnaire to collect honest feedback about the happiness of my colleagues

Half a year full of lessons.

Tobias Zander has written a blog post about Motivation of software engineers. These are my motivations.

I've written an article about the fintech scene in Frankfurt which you can find at hallofrankfurt.de.

Book review of Joy, Inc. by Richard Sheridan

2015

If not for yourself, you owe it to your peers to be a good example by not executing your working time flexibility during your vacation.

I create developer firewalls for a living. And it is so wrong.

Having a vision and a set of values will empower your team and remove a lot of potential for misunderstandings from your day to day interaction within your team. This helps them to focus on their work instead of arguing about it and build momentum because it removes uncertainties about what should be done.

Get rich by visiting this conference: rich in ideas, options and connections

This post tries to explain the rationale behind one of my recent tweets: Phone is bad, Chat is good.

In my opinion the default shedule for the weekend is not educating the teams enough to focus on what matters in those 54 hours: *validate their assumptions* about the business idea and *prepare a presentation*. For this year I've created a new shedule which includes more concrete deliverables and divides the weekend into distinct slots.

An important role in your search for developers is your job page. Don't miss the chance to impress a curious developer because every candidate will browse your website to look up your job postings.

OpenData projects must be useful not just interesting, so here is my idea

I joined a #fintech startup which aims to change the way SME finance their investments and it also changed the way I look at managers

You can now stick #RheinMainRocks where you like!

I started mentoring and I will not offer any more office hours on a fixed schedule.

On April 2nd 2015 I'll be giving a lightning talk to show some examples of organizations that have already arrived at the future of work.

How to make your meetings fun again, productive and produce a well-made protocol afterwards.

How to make sure you never lose the source code of your business.

From April 1st 2015 I'm available to join a new team where I can craft software, my leadership skills to the organization and my wit to the daily stand-up.

On the next Monday, February 23rd 2015, I'll be at a run-down place that used to be a super market and hosting the 10th Webmontag Offenbach.

A fews weeks ago I announced that I am holding free bi-monthly CTO office hours and the first one I did revolved around the question “How to find a CTO?”. In this post I aim to summarize the advice I gave.

Encrypt login links with the users public PGP key to add a simple but effective layer of security with only a small usability impact.

I'll offer free bimonthly office hours starting January 2015.

2014

December 1st is World AIDS Day and we have prepared something for your homepage which will support our cause in an unobtrusive and witty way: turn the fullstops of your page into pink dots.

So, you are attending a startup weekend? You will be crammed in a room with strangers to collaborate on an idea-maybe even yours? I have some advice for you to improve your output during this 54 hours.

2013

If you're using assetic to manage your assets in your Symfony2 project you have probably already wondered if there is a way to update the assets_version parameter automatically with every deploy.

Sehr guter Artikel darüber, das die Entwicklung einer guten mobilen Website nicht nur mit CSS-Media-Queries erreicht werden kann.

Tincr ist eine sehr nützliche Extension für Chrome, die Änderungen an lokalen Dateien überwacht und die Änderungen im Browser anwenden. Änderungen an CSS-Dateien können dabei sogar ohne Neu-Laden der Seiten angewendet werden.

We need tools not protocols for editing content on the web. In my first article I barely scratched the surface of what is missing to encourage collaboration on public available data. In this article I’d like to share my view of what is missing.

When dealing with structured data there are no tools for collaboration

Unter usergroups.rheinmainrocks.de habe ich ein Projekt gestartet, dessen Ziel es ist, einen umfangreichen Überblick über das Angebot der Technologie-Usergroups im Rhein-Main-Gebiet zu geben. Der konkrete Mehrwert besteht darin, dass die Daten zu den Usergroups von jedem selber gepflegt werden können. Es wird lediglich ein GitHub-Account benötigt.

2012

Ähnlich wie die Ant Build Commons von qafoo, liefert Sebastian Bergmann unter jenkins-php.org Vorlagen für Integration von PHP-Projekten in Jenkins.

Die qafoo GmbH aus Gelsenkirchen, ein Zusammenschluss von vier deutschen PHP-Experten liefert mit den Ant Build Commons einen Standard-Satz an Build-Task für Ant, die alle wichtigen Aufgaben zum Prüfen, Testen und Veröffentlichen in PHP-basierten Projekten abdecken.

So schreibt es Hetzner gerade in einer E-Mail an seine Kunden.

Hier sind ein paar Einstellungen die die Darstellung der Ausgabe von git diff und weiteren git-Kommandos lesbarer machen:

Frameworks zu vergleichen ist immer eine schlechte Idee, zu viele Faktoren spielen bei der Wahl eines Frameworks eine Rolle, als dass man sich rein auf quantitative Aussagen wie Anfragen pro Sekunde, Zeilen Quellcode oder die geschlossenen Bugs pro Monat verlassen darf.

Mit der adb shell ist es einfach möglich das Handling von Intents zu testen ` sehr praktisch, wenn man z.B. in der App normalerweise einen QR-Code-Scanner verwendet, um eine URL zu erhalten.

Eine Einführung in JSON-LD

An introduction to JSON-LD

2011

Mit diesem Script erzeuge ich für alle Virtuellen-Hosts eines Apache2-Webservers eine Konfiguration für Logrotate.

Diese zwei Kollegen stehen immer auf meinem Schreibtisch bei meinem aktuellen Arbeitgeber. Vor ein paar Monaten standen sie bei Scholz&Volkmer und als ich mit einem Kollegen darüber sprach, ist ein interessantes Bildnis entstanden.

Wenn man in der glücklichen Situation ist, ein Angebot zu schreiben, ist dessen Basis in der Regel auch eine möglichst genaue Beschreibung über den Umfang des Auftrags, im Allgemeinen Pflichtenheft genannt.

Beim Top Coder Gewinnspiel der Mayflower GmbH habe ich mit meiner Einreichung den ersten Preis gewonnen: ein iPad 2.

Oft genug sieht man Methodendefinitionen mit Standardwerten für Argumente, da viele Programmiersprachen das Überladen von Methoden, wie z.B. in Java, nicht unterstützen.

Der Dummy-Image-Generator erzeugt auf Wunsch die passenden Bilder. Wenn man aber auch mal lokal ein paar Dateien braucht, um z.B. einen Uploader oder eine Galerie zu testen, kann man sich mit ein paar Zeilen Python schnell ein paar Testbilder erzeugen:

Diese sind, zumindest unter Arch Linux, standardmäßig nur mittels FN+F zum auslösen zu bewegen.

Im neuesten Firefox funktionieren einige Zertifikate nicht mehr, mit denen z.B. Zugänge zu Content-Management-Systemen oder Banking-Webseiten gesichert werden.

Ja, manchmal muss man halt via SSH auf Maschinen rumhacken, auf denen es kein vernünftiges Error-Reporting gibt. Und wenn dann die Seite weiß bleibt, hilft dieses Kommando, um heraus zur finden, welche der Dateien man zerschossen hat:

2010

Manchmal, also eigentlich regelmäßig, hängt Eclipse.

Die Bash hat eine tolle Funktion: Mittels der Tab-Taste erhält man eine Liste mit Dateien und Verzeichnissem im aktuell eingegeben Pfad-Abschnitt.

Oft ruft man Bash-Scripte ja mit relativen Pfaden auf:

In Java 1.6 gibt es einen Bug im Dom-XML-Parser, der Whitespaces trotz aktiviertem Hinweis nicht entfernt.

Der Standard-Werte für den @author-Tag in JavaDoc ist der Username des Accounts, der Eclipse gestartet hat.

Auch die PECL Erweiterung crack muss erst überredet werden, sich auf Ubuntu zur Verfügung zu stellen, da beim Installieren folgender Fehler auftritt:

Da einige der Maschinen, mit denen ich arbeite noch (aktuelle) Gentoo-System sind, gibt es immer wieder Probleme, die Gentoo-spezifisch sind, und damit oft auch nervig.

Um sich die wiederkehrende Passwort-Abfragen für SSH-Keys auf der Konsole zu sparen, führt man folgende Kommandos aus:

Zum Einstellen der Zeitzone in Ubuntu führt man dieses Kommando aus und folgt den Anweisungen.

Dieses Bash-Script konvertiert alle Nicht-UTF-8-Dateien in einem Verzeichnis und in allen Unterverzeichnissen nach UTF-8.

Dieses kleine Bash-Script, versendet als Cronjob eingetragen, E-Mails an den root-User, wenn der Plattenplatz auf allen gemounteten /dev/hd*-Platten weniger als 1 GB beträgt.

Wie könnte es auch anders sein?!

Dieses kleine Bash-Kommando listet die Zugriffe in einer bestimmten Zeit (20/Oct/2008:21 = am 20. Oktober 2008 zwischen 21:00:00 und 21:56:59) und sortiert diese nach Häufigkeit.

Zum Sichern von Daten auf FTP-Server bietet sich duplicity. Es bietet, ähnlich wie rdiff-backup, die Möglichkeit, volle und inkrementelle Backups zu erzeugen, aber im Gegensatz zu rdiff-Backup eben auf FTP-Server und noch dazu verschlüsselt.