Posts

As a demo for a talk my colleague Christoph and I gave at Futurice, also visited by students from HPI, I put together a small playground for creating and managing Micro Services. It’s work in progress, but usable already and might be a good starting point if you would like to try out your own setup with Docker, Consul and Prometheus. The actual nice thing is, that it’s basically just a collection of Docker CLI commands. Nice images are available already, I just threw in a super simple Clojure Service. ...

I like listening to podcast while running. During marathon preparation I run around 50-60km per week, so there is plenty of time to learn exciting stuff about latest technologies. Here are my favorite podcasts for software developers: Software Engineering Radio http://www.se-radio.net/ Software Engineering Radio is an awesome Podcast if you are a professional software developer and want to hear about tech in-depth. This is probably my favorite Podcast of them all: Excellent choice of topics, great guests and high quality production. ...

After visiting the Mozilla meetup, I decided to give the Firefox Developer Edition a spin. Pretty smooth sailing so far. However, there was one minor glitch and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, how to fix it: I could not set the Developer Edition installation as my default browser in Gnome (with Gnome Shell on Fedora 22). I did a manual installation of the Firefox Developer Edition and could run and use it. But as Gnome wasn’t aware of it, I could not select it in the Gnome “Default Applications” settings, neither did it work from within the Firefox settings. ...

This weekend, Futurice met in Helsinki for our annual #futucamp. What an excellent opportunity to improve the web of trust by having a Key Signing Party. Now it’s your turn: On your next company event or wherever you meet people, think about verifying identities and matching public keys. If you meet me anywhere (e.g. meetups or conferences), I can sign your public key as long as you provide an ID with a photo, as well as your public key fingerprint. ...

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it. ― Andrejs Dunkels

Today I visited and became a member at *Leila. You can think of it as a “lending library for things”. You can get a wide selection of tools, games, cooking equipment, electronic devices and much more. It works like this: You become a member by providing at least one of your items to the *Leila stock. Other members can lend your item from now on, without any costs. Per given item you can also get only one item, giving two items and you can lend two items at the same time. As simple as that! ...

I am in the process of migrating services from properitary, closed solutions over to open and libre products. OwnCloud, SubSonic and iRedMail replaced Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Mail and Calendar, as well as Spotify (way smaller library admittedly). A remaining bummer was my reliance on Android with a significant amount of Google services. So I was happy to give Mozilla’s Firefox OS a chance. Here are my experiences so far. Firefox OS The latest Firefox OS available for my hardware was v2.0. So not the latest iteration (v2.2) but at least the most recent major release. Your mileage with Firefox OS v1.x may vary a lot. ...

I was struggling to get use Facebook React’s props in Reagent’s lifecycle hooks. Don’t worry if you are in the same boat, here comes the solution. My current way of doing this is to use reagent.core/props in the lifecycle hooks. Here is a small working example (based on my work on an application for polytopic vector analysis (PVA): PVA-Parrot), illustrating how to plot with Reagent and the Flot charting library. Pay attention to the usage of `props` in the first `let` block. ...

Do you think your company should leverage Big Data? Are you looking for Hadoop and Apache Storm engineers already? Did you evaluate cloud service to run distributed computations and your DevOps team enjoys some good trainings about how to manage those? That’s awesome! Well, as long as you actually need all that stuff: Yes, there is a lot of buzz around Big Data. And yes, I am convinced there is a tremendous amount of value in it. Big Data based companies are real and they can have disruptive products. ...

So far I blogged here only about failing at my first marathon. The lessons learned paid off in the end. Meanwhile I ran two official marathons: My debut in Dresden 2013 (03:55:16) and in 2014 I ran the Berlin marathon (03:55:13). Success is worth mentioning too, right? ;) Berlin Marathon Berlin Marathon Finish Berlin Marathon Medals Both I was able to finish in under 4h. For me that’s a great result especially for the debut in Dresden. Great achievements? Well for sure, but no reason to settle. Actually a good foundation to build upon: Now I am aiming at running my first ultra marathon! In 2015 I would like to run 50km at once. Does not necessarily have to be an official race, something in the country side would be great, as a contrast to the city runs. ...