Open-source maintainer, speaker, rebel. About me.

10th of December, 2017

Making Myself Obsolete

 In December 2015 I was looking for static analysis tools to integrate into trivago's CI process. The idea was to detect typical programming mistakes automatically. That's quite a common thing, and there are lots of helpful tools out there which fit the bill. So I looked for a list of tools... More »

7th of November, 2017

Modern Day Annoyances - Digital Clocks

 This morning I woke up to the beeping noise of our oven's alarm clock. The reason was that I tried to correct the oven's local time the day before — and I pushed the wrong buttons. As a result I didn't set the correct time, instead, I set a cooking timer... and that's what woke me up today. More »

15th of October, 2017

Learn Some Rust During Hacktoberfest

 October is the perfect time to contribute to Open Source — at least according to Github and DigitalOcean. Because that's when they organize Hacktoberfest, a global event where you get a free shirt and lots of street cred for creating pull requests. More »

10th of October, 2017

A Little Story About the `yes` Unix Command

 What's the simplest Unix command you know? There's echo, which prints a string to stdout and true, which always terminates with an exit code of 0. Among the rows of simple Unix commands, there's also yes. If you run it without arguments, you get an infinite stream of y's, separated by a newline: y … More »

18th of September, 2017

Lightning Fast Image Previews with Pure CSS and LQIP

 My website is reasonably fast. There was one thing left which really annoyed me: layout reflow after images got loaded. The problem is, that the image dimensions are not known when the text is ready to be displayed. As a result, the text will be pushed down on the screen as soon as an image is loaded above. I decided to fix that once and for all. More »

15th of September, 2017

Go vs Rust? Choose Go.

 Rust or Go, which one should I choose? is a question I get quite often. Both languages seem to be competing for the same user base and they both seem to be *systems programming* languages, so there must be a clear winner, right? More »

12th of August, 2017

Of Boxes and Trees - Smart Pointers in Rust

 Recently, I tried to implement a binary tree data structure in Rust. Each binary tree has a root value, a left, and a right subtree. I started from this Python implementation, which is quite straightforward. More »

10th of July, 2017

Why Type Systems Matter

 I've written most of my code in dynamically typed languages such as Python or PHP. But ever since dabbling with Rust, I've developed a passion for static type systems. It began to feel very natural to me; like a totally new way to express myself. More »

18th of May, 2017

Being a Professional Programmer

 When I was around 12, I set myself the goal to become a professional programmer. I can tell, because at this time I made the conscious decision to use my right hand to control the mouse — even though I'm left-handed. My reasoning was, that if I ever had to help out a colleague with a computer proble… More »
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