my blog. for you.

Let’s talk digital.

I’m an independent IT consultant and entrepreneur in the Internet and software business. I’m interested in design, enterprise applications, web apps and SaaS products. I design and develop business solutions and applications. I help companies in terms of software quality and knowledge transfer, e.g. with Angular and Spring Boot.

Ruby on Rails: The Documentary

Ruby on Rails has one of the most faithful communities online, it also has one of the most controversial, rabble-rousing creators out there, Danish programmer, David Heinemeier Hansson. Widely known as DHH, David tells us how Rails went from a crazy idea to one of the most talked-about full-stack frameworks over the course of 20 years. Given that Ruby on Rails has been hugely influential and seminal in the software development industry for the last two decades, not least by inspiring ... Read more

Self-Publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers: A Recap of Our Writing Process for Stratospheric

This week, Philip Riecks - one of the co-authors with whom I wrote Stratospheric - From Zero to Production with Spring Boot and AWS - published this article about our writing process for that ebook on his new blog about subjects such as freelancing, motivation, indie hacking, or productivity: Self-Publishing a Book With (Almost) Complete Strangers This highly detailed documentation of our writing process not only describes how we went about writing, publishing, and marketing Stratospheric but also gives a slew of suggestions, ... Read more

Working Across Timezones in Remote Work Settings and Distributed Environments

When working in a distributed environment or remote work environment, as is increasingly - and quite fortunately - becoming the default for knowledge workers, and the software industry in particular, chances are, rather sooner than later you'll be collaborating across timezones. I'm currently collaborating with people from EDT, GMT, CEST, MYT, JST, and AEST timezones, for instance. Asynchronous communication is crucial in a remote work setting already when no time differences are involved. It becomes absolutely vital when people from different timezones depend ... Read more

Lösung für die COVID-19 Pandemie: Schnelltests als Zugangsberechtigung

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.Contrary to my usual writing habits the remainder of this post will be in German. The reason for this is that although the subject most certainly is of interest to everyone the specifics of the solution outlined in the following mostly apply to the current COVID-19 situation in Germany and my personal experience with that situation. The article therefore is mostly relevant to a German audience. If you're interested in discussing the potential for ... Read more

My Remote Work Setup

I've been a proponent of remote work, new ways of work and different approaches to work culture and the opportunities and options those provide for a long time. While 2019 arguably was the year when remote work finally caught on for more than just a select few, 2020 most definitely was the year when remote work really took off - for obvious reasons. I'd like to quickly share some of the tools and components from my current setup, in terms of both specific ... Read more

2020 in Live Gigs

I'm an avid music fan and concert-goer. As mentioned in last week's post I'd like to write a bit about live music events in 2020. For obvious reasons, 2020 has both been a very different and a very difficult year for live events and those that make a living from them: Artists and performers, speakers, conferences, festival, venues, sound engineers, sound and lighting technicians, caterers, stage hands. These were the only bands I was able to see during on-location live music shows ... Read more

Fetching Incoming Invoices in an Automated Fashion With Puppeteer

Like I said in 2016, accounting is still a manual and tedious process. However, since then I've made quite some headway, especially with regard to automatically fetching and storing incoming invoices. By now, all of those thankfully arrive via email, which allows me to have Zapier automatically fetch them and store attached invoice PDFs in the appropriate folders in Google Drive. One particular, lasting pet peeve of mine in that respect, however, so far has been German railway company Deutsche Bahn AG and ... Read more

Reprise: Petro Salema – Storyteller Extraordinaire

Almost five years ago I wrote about a talk given by Petro Salema at that year's edition of beyond tellerrand in Düsseldorf: Petro Salema – Designing Interfaces That Think @ beyond tellerrand Düssedorf 2015 A common advice given regarding talks and presentations, especially ones of a more technical variety, is to not just talk about technical details but to tell a story. While this piece of advice is good and well-intentioned it's not usually exemplified or specified in any more detail. Steve Jobs is ... Read more

Remote Work Is Here to Stay: Best Practices and Tools

2019 seems to have been the year when remote work finally caught on. While not exactly the new default yet it's not as alien and outré anymore as it used to be just a few years ago. Today, instead of being ridiculed or looking into bewildered faces proponents of remote work are usually taken seriously. You're also far less likely to hear bromides such as "Yeah, we don't do that here because in-person communication is easier." (a claim often made but ... Read more

Boring Solutions Revisited: Choose Boring Technology by Dan McKinley

Dan McKinley's article on choosing boring solutions, although not exactly new anymore, has been a welcome reminder for me to revisit the topic of of using boring solutions and keeping things simple. Dan makes the point that "adding technology to your company comes with a cost" or as I stated in my own article on this subject: "The elephant in the room is: There’s an opportunity cost to everything." Most choices come with a trade-off. If you decide to use a technology for the ... Read more
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