24th of April, 2020

Hacker Folklore

Some computer terms have a surprising legacy. Many of them are derived from long-obsolete technologies. This post tries to dust off the exciting history of some of these terms that we use every day but aren't quite sure about their origins. Most of the content comes from sources like Wikipedia (with… More »

4th of February, 2020

A Timelapse of Timelapse

Timelapse is a little open-source screen recorder for macOS. It takes a screenshot every second and creates a movie in the end. To celebrate its unlikely 1.0 release today, I present here a timelapse of this project's journey. It just took ten years to get here. More »

17th of October, 2019

A Tiny, Static, Full-Text Search Engine using Rust and WebAssembly

I wrote a basic search module that you can add to a static website. It's very lightweight (50kB-100kB gzipped) and should work with Hugo, Zola, and Jekyll. Only searching for entire words is supported. Try the search box on the left for a demo. The code is on Github. Static site generators are m… More »

21st of March, 2019

Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes

Kubernetes is the 800-pound gorilla of container orchestration. It powers some of the biggest deployments worldwide, but it comes with a price tag... More »

2nd of December, 2018

What Is Rust Doing Behind the Curtains?

Rust allows for a lot of syntactic sugar, that makes it a pleasure to write. It is sometimes hard, however, to look behind the curtain and see what the compiler is really doing with our code. More »

5th of November, 2018

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Excel Macros

I never was a big fan of internships, partially because all the exciting companies were far away from my little village in Bavaria and partially because I was too shy to apply. Only once I applied for an internship in Ireland as part of a school program. Our teacher assigned the jobs and so my friend got one at Apple and I ended up at a medium-sized IT distributor — let's call them PcGo. More »

2nd of September, 2018

Switching from a German to a US Keyboard Layout - Is It Worth It?

For the first three decades of my life, I've used a German keyboard layout. A few months ago, I switched to a US layout. This post summarizes my thoughts around the topic. I was looking for a similar article before jumping the gun, but I couldn't find one — so I'll try to fill this gap. Why switch? … More »

31st of July, 2018

fastcat - A Faster `cat` Implementation Using Splice

Lots of people asked me to write another piece about the internals of well-known Unix commands. Well, actually, nobody asked me, but it makes for a good intro. I'm sure you’ve read the previous parts about `yes` and `ls` — they are epic. More »

9th of June, 2018

That Octocat on the Wall

So I'm in a bit of a sentimental mood lately. Github got acquired by Microsoft. While I think the acquisition was well-deserved, I still wish it didn't happen. Let me explain. More »

20th of May, 2018

Ten Years of Vim

When I opened Vim by accident for the first time, I thought it was broken. My keystrokes changed the screen in unpredictable ways, and I wanted to undo things and quit. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience. There was something about it though, that kept me coming back and it became my main editor. Fast forward ten years (!) and I still use Vim. Why is that? More »