Turning 40. Things went by much quicker than I expected. Here’s an attempt to put into words what
shifted along the way — what I gained, what I lost, and what I stopped caring about entirely.
Funnily enough (or sadly, depends on your type of humour), in all the projects I worked on, the
decision to go with Angular was rarely driven by hands-on frontend experience. It was usually made
from a C-level perspective — prioritising perceived safety and enterprise credibility over
developer ergonomics.
I was involved in the R&D of NEEO right from the start. It was a good time — until it wasn’t.
Since I left the company about two or three years in, I’ve often wondered what could have been if
we had done things differently. This is a postmortem. And maybe a way for me to finally put this
behind me.
The docs tell me it’s directly related to the episode I had in spring, where I spent 2 weeks in
hospital due to a hematolysis. Apparently, during a hematolysis, the liver works overtime to get
rid of all the dead blood cells, thus creating a lot of waste material that is subsequently stored
as gall in the gall bladder. The chemical composition is out of balance though, causing stones
(salts) to form there in. If those stones decide to move, that’s when you start to feel pain.
I’ve ran a few E-Commerce projects in the past. Mostly small business online stores using stacks
like Drupal Commerce and other PHP based cart solutions. Things always got a bit tacky when trying
to match the UI/UX of the cart solution to existing CMS based websites though. At some point,
customisations just got too complicated and intrusive and - which is important in the segment I’m
floating in - too costly: spending a lot of money to match two different platforms.
There’s a new kind of minimalist movement sprouting, trying to make websites as small as possible.
Well - “new” - taking into account, that their approach is basically to make websites like we used
to make them in 2001 .. this can hardly be considered “new”. But anyways, I was trying to see how
large a couple of mainstream websites are on their first pageload and how that translates into a
rough estimate in terms of transferred assets and loading time.
It feels quite surreal to look back. It’s been only a few months but with everything happening
since, feels like a year. The world changed dramatically since.
About 2 years ago I started a bit of an odyssee to find a convenient, affordable and production
ready way to deploy my web application stack. My goal was to make it viable by the above criteria,
especially to have a stack/product in a segment that would normally end up on a shared webhost
with clients that are used to shared webhosting pricing.
Some prints turn out great, some fail completely and most aren’t really practically useful ;-).
The key “fix” above is the only print we’ve made so far that actually has a functional aspect to
it. I have to admit, most of the prints are just for fun. But it’s immensely satisfying to fix
even a bloody mailbox key.
Roughly 2 months ago I noticed that one of the EPs I released on Enough
Records showed up on Spotify. Turns out it was pushed to
Spotify and YouTube via routenote.com on behalf of Enough. I got in
touch with PS/Enough to find out more and we ended up putting together an Album made of two EPs,
both of whom weren’t broadly publicly released. There’s no new tracks but I still find it funny to
have my stuff visible on Spotify. :-)
I wanted to bring back comments for my blog articles for a while now. The downside of using a
headless CMS is to some extent, that there are mostly no batteries included. Most headless systems
are pretty unspecific and versatile, which is nice in so many ways. But pretty time consuming in
others. I could have modelled a comment system on sanity.io, hooked up some endpoints on my
Express and all of that jazz but decided against it. It just gets too complex, way too quickly.
And I really don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel, once again.
I was using Adobe software since I first got a (cough not entirely legal cough) version of
Photoshop about 20 years ago. When I started my own business, I bought licences for Creative Suite
and switched over to the subscription model as soon as it was introduced. Since my daily business
shifted to being very screen-centric and print became a side effect of sorts, I was tossing around
the idea of quitting Adobe software for quite a while. Since my renewal was up by December 2019, I
ended up cancelling. To be honest, it felt weird.
GitLab offers free shared runners (with a quota) to run your CI pipelines. This is extremeley
generous and I’ve come to depend heavily on using them for my projects. Combined with their free
tier, I don’t see a reason to not use GitLab. I haven’t paid a single dime for one year, things
are stable and there’s only little down time on the shared runner pool.
The climate. We love talking about it, don’t we. We can spend multiple news cycles analysing
someone’s remarks about wether or not climate change is real, while we have proof right at our
doorsteps. Or, lately, wether the situation is man-made or not. Seems like we accepted the fact
that the bowl is broken after a decade of looking at it, falling down from the table in slow
motion.
Well we are there again. Tons of features you’re dying to use but a certain platform, the one your
client insists you absolutely HAVE to support (“the CEO is using IE11, so..”), does not support
them. I have been playing this game since IE6 first got the heat and history is repeating itself
in a strange fashion with the stuff coming from Redmond.
Visual Studio Code has come a long way since I first started to
use it in early 2017. It’s fast and responsive, I can style it to my convenience (e.g. font sizes
in the drawer etc). And it supports almost everything I need on a daily basis: TS, styled
components, Angular, React, a bit of PHP now and then. But there’s some things that are tickling
my nerves big time:
I’ve had the opportunity to dive into React quite extensively for the past two months. Large
project. Many, many components. Rather complicated setup on the backend, including a Python CMS
which hydrates the SPA, in many different ways, including acting as a REST intermediary service
for some other 3rd party APIs.
Cleaning up my digital footprint allowed me to revisit a lot of services I have used in the past
and basically just forgot about in the last 7-8 years. In the process, I realised how fragmented
the internet is. How much content is there, outdated, sitting on a bleak corner of the web on a
service that once thrived and has been superseded by “the next cool thing”?
I am going to delete all my social media accounts in the next few days. Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth. Was thinking long and hard about this, but it’s the best way
forward. I could just delete all the apps first, but hell, why bother. Time to cut the middle man
and continuing defragmentation. Or to put it in more elaborate terms: bye bye bitches. Hehe.
This early access game was on sale on steam after I noticed that Dungeon Keeper 1 was for free on
Origin. DK1 is great in so many ways, I played it for a few hours (320x240 or so, ugh) and decided
to look around again for a “real spiritual successor”.
I’ve spent a lot of time making music (or noise) in the past 18 years and I noticed a sort of
inevitable progression that ended in the inevitable lack of inspiration for me.
Tools
Beyond this point, 144 hopelessly outdated posts gather dust.
Turning 40. Things went by much quicker than I expected. Here’s an attempt to put into words what
shifted along the way — what I gained, what I lost, and what I stopped caring about entirely.
Funnily enough (or sadly, depends on your type of humour), in all the projects I worked on, the
decision to go with Angular was rarely driven by hands-on frontend experience. It was usually made
from a C-level perspective — prioritising perceived safety and enterprise credibility over
developer ergonomics.
I was involved in the R&D of NEEO right from the start. It was a good time — until it wasn’t.
Since I left the company about two or three years in, I’ve often wondered what could have been if
we had done things differently. This is a postmortem. And maybe a way for me to finally put this
behind me.
The docs tell me it’s directly related to the episode I had in spring, where I spent 2 weeks in
hospital due to a hematolysis. Apparently, during a hematolysis, the liver works overtime to get
rid of all the dead blood cells, thus creating a lot of waste material that is subsequently stored
as gall in the gall bladder. The chemical composition is out of balance though, causing stones
(salts) to form there in. If those stones decide to move, that’s when you start to feel pain.
I’ve ran a few E-Commerce projects in the past. Mostly small business online stores using stacks
like Drupal Commerce and other PHP based cart solutions. Things always got a bit tacky when trying
to match the UI/UX of the cart solution to existing CMS based websites though. At some point,
customisations just got too complicated and intrusive and - which is important in the segment I’m
floating in - too costly: spending a lot of money to match two different platforms.
There’s a new kind of minimalist movement sprouting, trying to make websites as small as possible.
Well - “new” - taking into account, that their approach is basically to make websites like we used
to make them in 2001 .. this can hardly be considered “new”. But anyways, I was trying to see how
large a couple of mainstream websites are on their first pageload and how that translates into a
rough estimate in terms of transferred assets and loading time.
It feels quite surreal to look back. It’s been only a few months but with everything happening
since, feels like a year. The world changed dramatically since.
About 2 years ago I started a bit of an odyssee to find a convenient, affordable and production
ready way to deploy my web application stack. My goal was to make it viable by the above criteria,
especially to have a stack/product in a segment that would normally end up on a shared webhost
with clients that are used to shared webhosting pricing.
Some prints turn out great, some fail completely and most aren’t really practically useful ;-).
The key “fix” above is the only print we’ve made so far that actually has a functional aspect to
it. I have to admit, most of the prints are just for fun. But it’s immensely satisfying to fix
even a bloody mailbox key.
Roughly 2 months ago I noticed that one of the EPs I released on Enough
Records showed up on Spotify. Turns out it was pushed to
Spotify and YouTube via routenote.com on behalf of Enough. I got in
touch with PS/Enough to find out more and we ended up putting together an Album made of two EPs,
both of whom weren’t broadly publicly released. There’s no new tracks but I still find it funny to
have my stuff visible on Spotify. :-)
I wanted to bring back comments for my blog articles for a while now. The downside of using a
headless CMS is to some extent, that there are mostly no batteries included. Most headless systems
are pretty unspecific and versatile, which is nice in so many ways. But pretty time consuming in
others. I could have modelled a comment system on sanity.io, hooked up some endpoints on my
Express and all of that jazz but decided against it. It just gets too complex, way too quickly.
And I really don’t feel like re-inventing the wheel, once again.
I was using Adobe software since I first got a (cough not entirely legal cough) version of
Photoshop about 20 years ago. When I started my own business, I bought licences for Creative Suite
and switched over to the subscription model as soon as it was introduced. Since my daily business
shifted to being very screen-centric and print became a side effect of sorts, I was tossing around
the idea of quitting Adobe software for quite a while. Since my renewal was up by December 2019, I
ended up cancelling. To be honest, it felt weird.
GitLab offers free shared runners (with a quota) to run your CI pipelines. This is extremeley
generous and I’ve come to depend heavily on using them for my projects. Combined with their free
tier, I don’t see a reason to not use GitLab. I haven’t paid a single dime for one year, things
are stable and there’s only little down time on the shared runner pool.
The climate. We love talking about it, don’t we. We can spend multiple news cycles analysing
someone’s remarks about wether or not climate change is real, while we have proof right at our
doorsteps. Or, lately, wether the situation is man-made or not. Seems like we accepted the fact
that the bowl is broken after a decade of looking at it, falling down from the table in slow
motion.
Well we are there again. Tons of features you’re dying to use but a certain platform, the one your
client insists you absolutely HAVE to support (“the CEO is using IE11, so..”), does not support
them. I have been playing this game since IE6 first got the heat and history is repeating itself
in a strange fashion with the stuff coming from Redmond.
Visual Studio Code has come a long way since I first started to
use it in early 2017. It’s fast and responsive, I can style it to my convenience (e.g. font sizes
in the drawer etc). And it supports almost everything I need on a daily basis: TS, styled
components, Angular, React, a bit of PHP now and then. But there’s some things that are tickling
my nerves big time:
I’ve had the opportunity to dive into React quite extensively for the past two months. Large
project. Many, many components. Rather complicated setup on the backend, including a Python CMS
which hydrates the SPA, in many different ways, including acting as a REST intermediary service
for some other 3rd party APIs.
Cleaning up my digital footprint allowed me to revisit a lot of services I have used in the past
and basically just forgot about in the last 7-8 years. In the process, I realised how fragmented
the internet is. How much content is there, outdated, sitting on a bleak corner of the web on a
service that once thrived and has been superseded by “the next cool thing”?
I am going to delete all my social media accounts in the next few days. Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth. Was thinking long and hard about this, but it’s the best way
forward. I could just delete all the apps first, but hell, why bother. Time to cut the middle man
and continuing defragmentation. Or to put it in more elaborate terms: bye bye bitches. Hehe.
This early access game was on sale on steam after I noticed that Dungeon Keeper 1 was for free on
Origin. DK1 is great in so many ways, I played it for a few hours (320x240 or so, ugh) and decided
to look around again for a “real spiritual successor”.
I’ve spent a lot of time making music (or noise) in the past 18 years and I noticed a sort of
inevitable progression that ended in the inevitable lack of inspiration for me.
Tools
Beyond this point, 144 hopelessly outdated posts gather dust.
Today was supposed to be our flight back. That, too, will be an insurance case. However, we got a single hospital bedroom meanwhile. We just make it work somehow. All things considered: it could be worse, of course. I am long past the “5 stages of grief”-thing at this point, that took about 2 weeks. Therapy still doesn’t improve the values but at least I am hovering around 5.9-6.4 g/dl HGB. Normal is around 13.
January 22, 2026
We wanted to spend one warm, sunny month in Vietnam starting January 3rd. WAIHA paid me a visit on day 3. I’m still undergoing treatment in a hospital in Ho Chi Minh. Therapy isn’t taking off. Goddamnit.
February 12, 2024
The laaawd has heard my prayers, and I am now a happy camper in the Payload CMS open source headless CMS camp. Only thing that doesn’t vibe with me that much is the dependency on nextjs they basically introduced right about the time I discovered it. But oh well. This is much more than just a content platform. I see great potential. I’ll take it!
December 4, 2022
I wanted to write an article about headless CMS and why it seems impossible to find a solution that works well for editorial content AND offers decent editing experience AND offers on-premise data/open source. But then I realised: It is pointless to make arguments. Either you are ok with the fact that the cool kids on the block with the fancy UX charge for their services and do not offer 100% open source or you are ok with the editing experience and the administration overhead when you choose something that you need to run yourself. That’s the adjustable knob. So I always end up back where I started, sanity.io ..
ToolsFrontend
May 23, 2022
Been using a Moonlander split keyboard for a few weeks now. Was intimidating at first but I’m already used to it now. Still not as fast as before but improvements are noticeable daily. Definitely allows for a more relaxed posture while typing. And so many options to configure, woohoo!
December 21, 2021
PSA: If you think buying an NFT is a good investment, please re-calibrate your risk assessment sensors. Thank me later.
December 21, 2021
In order to overcome this pandemic (and future events like that), we need to learn how to handle it, maybe even co-exist, without constant panic attacks that cause system wide earthquakes. The world is not going to end. The system needs to be healthy enough to handle this and we need to make sure that it is scaled accordingly. Make health care a public service and don’t run organizations that essentially handle life and death like a fucking start-up.
Rants
November 25, 2021
Every game I was hyped for in the past 18 months turned out to be quite the disappointment. Cyberpunk, Battlefield 2042 and even Farming Simulator 22, just to name a few. Other games are in eternal Early Access Mode. Others feel like a candy store, engineered to grab kid’s lunch money. Others like a never ending grind of “Battle Pass” after “Battle Pass”. Digital distribution definately changed the gaming landscape. Not long ago, EA said that full releases have to cost $70 because expenses have risen. Coincidentally, that’s about the point in time when things started to go down hill, too.
Gaming
August 6, 2021
Switched to WebStorm IDE about 3 months ago and ditched VS Code. Just finished a large refactoring of 3 Next JS projects that were based on the same foundation. The refactoring was much more painless because of WebStorm’s excellent refactoring tools. I think I’ll stick with it, this time around.
DevelopmentTools
August 6, 2021
yarn 3.0.0 was released last week and so far it was a great upgrade from yarn 0.2x. Works great as a drop-in replacement. Glad I skipped 2.x. ;)
