📖 Senior Engineer Diaries

Senior Engineer Diaries: Automatic Programming - Vibe Coding, But With a Plan

Vibe Coding is still a dumpster fire for production, but Automatic Programming, AI as your pair programmer, is a game-changer for me. At work, I rely on Claude Code for its enterprise readiness and consistency. In private projects, I’m transitioning to Vibe CLI for its raw speed and improving

🔨 Tech

GitOps for Minecraft: Making your two-week minecraft phase more organized

It was that time of year again. A group chat exploded with “let’s play Minecraft!”, a dozen adults suddenly nostalgic for 2012. I had a beautiful vision: a completely immutable Minecraft server. A Docker container, built once, that does not change at runtime. Just like a production system for

🔨 Tech

Convention Over Configuration: The Secret to Saner, Faster Development

You’re lying to yourself. Every new project starts the same way: You copy-paste a graveyard of config files - webpack.config.js, .eslintrc.json, tsconfig.json, you name it, like they’re sacred texts. You tweak them for hours. You argue about them in PRs. Not only that, but

🤔 Mindstorm

Why I Stopped Building My Own Meal Planner — and Chose Mealie Instead

I learned to cook as a kid, standing next to my mum, stirring pots and pretending I knew what I was doing. Then I went corporate. Canteen food, takeout, and the occasional sad salad became my diet. Cooking? That was something other people did. Then COVID-19 hit. Suddenly, my kitchen

📖 Senior Engineer Diaries

Senior Engineer Diaries: Love Letter to JetBrains

Let’s talk about IDE Stockholm syndrome. For years, I suffered. I tolerated Eclipse’s crashes and NetBeans’ limitations all while telling myself, “This is fine.” I convinced myself that debugging was supposed to feel like solving a murder mystery, that refactoring was just a fancy word for ‘find and

🔨 Tech

Yes, JSON can have a schema—and it's wildly underused.

If your first reaction is “JSON has a schema?” you’re not alone. Most folks treat JSON as a free-for-all playground until they hit a bug that makes them question everything. That’s where JSON Schema comes in. Think of it as a contract for your data: * What fields are

🤔 Mindstorm Featured

Pride Month is long over, companies. Can We Talk About Real Inclusion Now?

Some folks treat coming out like it’s a TED Talk. I’m not here for that. I'm part of the rainbow community. And I have been for years now. And honestly? That’s just one tab open in my mental browser—right next to “Kubernetes debugging,” “awk

📖 Senior Engineer Diaries

Senior Engineer Diaries: My No-BS AI Integration Story

AI is everywhere. Your grandma’s toaster probably runs a transformer model. And no, this isn’t new — AI has been a concept around since the 1950s. But once OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, everything went full Michael Bay. Suddenly, everything had AI — even the things that definitely didn’t need it.

🔨 Tech

Everything as code - Making your life easier

If you work in, IT is almost inevitable to encounter configuration or code at some point. They are the heart of almost any system we use daily. It allows us to define behavior, configure systems. But still, some of those actions are performed manually over and over again. This is

🔨 Tech

Goodbye own mail server

After almost a decade of hosting my mail server, an era is ending. My mail server is slowly drained and will be shutdown soon. This is a look back at the years, what troubles I faced, and why I finally gave up and will host my stuff with a hosting

🔨 Tech

Using webhookd for automated deployments

I recently updated the deployment workflow for my homepages and self-hosted services. In the process I've found webhookd, which now replaces my prior deployment workflow using SSH. Since this works quite nicely, I decided to share my solution with you. Why not just use Kubernetes or docker swarm?

🔨 Tech

We Are Developers 2024 in Berlin

After a long break due to the pandemic, I finally got the chance to attend a conference again! This time I went to Berlin for a legendary event that attracts developers from all corners of the world. Thanks to DeepL (the best translation company ever) and my individual learning budget,

Building secure python container images for production

I love container technology and wrote a while ago about Small Things for Building Better Container Images. Back then I also mentioned distroless images, but now I encountered other use cases where they simply did not work well, Python applications being one of them. The problem with distroless for Python

🔨 Tech

Monitoring & Alerting done right

Alerting in the tech world is a controversial topic. Everyone should have automated alerts when things go wrong. Reality is a bit more disappointing, with too many or flaky alerts to none at all. The aim of this post is to give you a better idea of the ideal setup.

🤔 Mindstorm

That's the way we've always done it, or how shit sticks for ages

In german there is a “nice” saying, a so called Totschlagargument, often translated to knockout argument. It is very commonly used by the traditional political parties like CSU & CDU or in general conservative people to kill a conversation about actual change. Unfortunately, it also found its way into the

🔨 Tech

Top 10 things to do for building better pipelines

CI/CD Pipelines are everywhere nowadays. There is a lot you can do, and a lot you should think about. This is the compilation of the top 10 things from my experience of building pipelines professionally for almost 5 years now. Pin versions Pinning your versions is the most crucial

🔨 Tech

Why I still use (GNU) make for many projects in 2024

So make has first appeared in 1978, which was 40 years ago. It was one of the tools included in Unix 1.0. Of course, a lot has changed since then, but the file format itself is still pretty simple and what makes it so powerful. Key Elements of a

🔨 Tech

Public money – Public code – What it is all about and why it is just logical.

As the world goes, more and more digital, software is required everywhere. Not only to make your internet surfing possible or chatting with your friends and family.  Governments need new software to make processes more automated and cost-effective. As taxpayers, we all pay the price for that as well, so

🔨 Tech

Small things for building better container images

Container images, commonly referred to as docker images, are everywhere nowadays, from the developers' workstation to the data center or even the cloud. It's easy to build those, but also easy to build something that's not ideal. A few useful tips for making your container

🤔 Mindstorm

Ethics in the job and why it is so important

Everyone, at some point, had a job where they had some decisions to make or tasks to they were not aligning with. And occasionally this is part of the job. At the end of the day, even your dream job can be annoying sometimes, and you just do it for

🧳 Travel

EU Trip 2023 | Rewind, Stats & Learning

Almost two months, my first real travel that went over two weeks. I saw a lot, experienced a lot and travelled a lot. This is a recap of the highlights for me, some stats and what stayed in my memory. The intention behind this post is to provide some insights,

🧳 Travel

EU-Trip 2023 | Week 12 (28.04 – 30.04)

It's already week 12 of my trip, following the post about week 11. This will also be the last diary entry as it's the last week. Have no clue/context, then the original post, It's finally time for an adventure, is for you. What

🧳 Travel

EU-Trip 2023 | Week 10 (18.04 – 22.04)

It's already week 10 of my trip, following the post about week 9. Have no clue/context, then the original post, It's finally time for an adventure, is for you. 18.04 – Travel to & first day in Budapest Woke up pretty early, slept not too

🧳 Travel

EU-Trip 2023 | Week 11 (23.04 – 27.04)

It's already week 11 of my trip, following the post about week 10. Have no clue/context, then the original post, It's finally time for an adventure, is for you. 23.04 – An afternoon in Ljubljana I got up right before my alarm, showered and checked

🧳 Travel

EU-Trip 2023 | Week 9 (13.04 – 17.04)

It's already week 9 of my trip, following the post about week 8. Have no clue/context, then the original post, It's finally time for an adventure, is for you. 13.04 – A day in Bialystok I hadn't planned much for Bialystok, just washing