BlogDB

Web feeds are not dead yet!

I remember using the web feeds (RSS and Atom) in Mozilla Firefox in the early 2000s. It was the time before social networks such as Facebook and Twitter took the web by storm. Sharing, liking, and ...

Defective by Design: Reflected Attacks on Email Privacy using DMARC

Email privacy is dead, confirmed for the umpteenth time. In this post I present the SOILED-PRIVACY attacks (Systemic Online Information Leakage using Email+DMARC against Privacy). These are two ref...

Vim as Python IDE

I’m by no means a Python developer, but as a sysadmin, I’m constantly interacting with Python - my scripting language of choice. My preferred text editor is Vim, which I’ve been using for as long a...

Wayland is Almost There

I finally break down and install wayland on my desktop at home, using sway to replace i3. Things go OK, mostly.

How to make a decentralized like button

All static websites meet a hard limit when a comment form, “like” buttons, or any interactive content is required. These extra components force people to build an API, host a server, a database or ...

Measuring Data Maturity

Lately I’ve been thinking about data maturity models within large organizations, and how to measure maturity and ability to use data. Specifically, what it means to be data literate or data fluent ...

How to get the best out of your technical internship

Hacking on "smu", a Minimal Markdown Parser

Hacking on "smu", a Minimal Markdown Parser Introduction I wanted to get my hands dirty and improve a suckless related program. So I had a look at the project ideas page and picked out something si...

Integrating cdk8s with Argo CD

After having a look at how to integrate cdk8s with Flux I was asked whether I could have a look at Argo CD as well. So without further ado, let’s integrate cdk8s with Argo CD. Argo CD But at first,...

The Feature Snowball

The “feature snowball”, as I like to call it, is a product and time management technique I’ve been successfully implementing for the last 10 years or so. I’ve used it across many personal projects,...

Suckless Software on My Desktop

Suckless Software on My Desktop I took a look at which simple programs I could use as a desktop environment instead of Gnome and picked out the following ones st as a terminal dwm as a window manag...

Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing

Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really borin...

Exercises in Simplicity

Exercises in Simplicity The more time I spent on software development, the more I come to appreciate simplicity. When software is buggy, slow or lacking features, that is annoying. But as long as i...

Introduction to the date-time API in Java 8

Integrating cdk8s with Flux

After I got used to cdk8s I was curious how well it integrates with some current continuous delivery tools for Kubernetes. Therefore I sat down for a quick session for integrating it with Flux. I w...

Defensive Finance in a Downturn

I live in the bay area of the United States in a suburb of San Francisco. At the time of writing, I’ve been in isolation from the world for roughly 3 weeks, with no clear end in sight. And while th...

Don't Waste Time Getting Feedback

Time is valuable. In fact, time is the single most valuable thing any of us have. That’s why I think it’s so important not to waste time if you don’t have to. Every second you waste working on some...

cdk8s, the future of Kubernetes application deployments?

Hint: As cdk8s is fairly new at the time of this writing expect that things will change/have changed. Intro cdk8s (probably cloud development kit for Kubernetes) is a new framework released by AWS ...

My Pandemic Zoom Setup

Now that everyone is spending many of their waking hours in Zoom, a lot of people are laughing at, and then asking me about, my Zoom setup. It’s actually not all that elaborate. I know many people ...

Exploring Immutable Infrastructure with Vault

During the last year, I have been curious about Immutable Infrastructure. After researching, I noticed that I had been applying some of these concepts already to stateless Docker containers, and I ...