🔨 Tech

From docker build to OCI Images: The Hidden Journey Behind Your Docker Container

Have you ever wondered how your Dockerfile and your project files on disk become a runnable container image that gets deployed to your Kubernetes cluster, used by other developers? This blog post goes beyond Docker as the fix for “Works on my machine”. You don't need to understand

📖 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

🔨 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

📖 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

📖 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

🔨 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,

🔨 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.

🔨 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,

🔨 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

🔨 Tech

Make frontend to microservice communication great again

Your frontend is still stuck on a monolithic architecture, while your backend seems to get increasingly distributed? Do you see yourself doing too many API calls in your frontend, maybe even worsening it with different structures? Then this is for you. Abstract it away The first and easiest way is

🔨 Tech

You should push your (IDE) config to version control — and here is why

Many gitignore files are full of ignores, for our IDEs and editors. Is it Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ, or even vim? But why are we excluding all files, many even consider it as a bad practice having them in the project at all! Make setup for new devs easier The

📄 How Tos / Tutorials

Build a self-contained shell installer

Have you ever had yourself in the situation where you want to have a one-in-all installer for stuff on *nix-systems or macOS? I got you covered. What are we going to build? The idea is simple, you have an installer, which also includes your files, what? Exactly!

📄 How Tos / Tutorials

Living in $HOME – Some tips to make your shell more comfy

Do you use your shell every day or would like to be more efficient with day to day task by utilizing the terminal? Then this article is for you. Entrypoint(s) There are different configuration files for your shell(s) where you can configure and customize. * /etc/profile – Loaded for

🔨 Tech

The ultimate guide to DMARC

DMARC stands for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting (and) Conformance. There are plenty of resources out there but no guide bundling everything you need to know, until now! In a nutshell DMARC is a set of standards making it standardized to detect and report abuse of mail systems across providers

🔨 Tech

Best Practices for GitHub Pull Requests

Pull Requests are there to save your day and your codebase! They are great and there are many features and best practices not everyone is aware of. To improve your work with Pull Requests for the future, I will give you a short overview of some best practices and hidden

📄 How Tos / Tutorials

Bookmarklets – Powerful and almost forgotten

What the hell is a bookmarklet? If you are not familiar with it and want to know more about it, then this is for you. We are going to go through the technical basics, why there are so useful and how to create one. In a nutshell As the name

🔨 Tech

JavaScript—it was never meant to be that way.

JavaScript. Nowadays, it is everywhere. And when I say everywhere, take it literally. From the classical use case in the browser, over the server-side logic until you reach the low-level section with embedded devices. And like no other language, it is really polarizing. Some people who hate it,

🔨 Tech

Top 10 DevOps Best Practices

There are plenty of best practices and things you should do out there, but some are essential and universal. I try to summarize them as the “top 10”. Of course, this is somewhat subjective. Pin your versions as specific as possible Software gets updates, updates might break things or include