Let's make due dates important again!

The talk „personal productivity patterns“ by my colleague Stefan Rotsch inspired me to overthink my personal behaviour and methods. Although I’m practicing GTD for 7 years now, and more or less successfully, I am still not satisfied how some things work. I thought about what I could do to improve my routines or to tear away fear from certain ones. I have to admit I rely heavily on digital tools for this process.

Published on 2016-09-19

Typo3 Neos: Automated deployment (without Surf)

For the new version of my own website I’ve planned to use Typo3 Neos. Since Neos is relatively new it includes a more versatile deployment workflow compared to traditional PHP applications which are often only installable / deployable via a clickable installer. Traditional installers not only create pain when trying to setup consistent development environments with Vagrant they are also more error prone due to the nature of frontends which are likely change the markup over time.

Published on 2015-03-25

Beware when trying to debug logstash with Sublime Text 3

The last days I’ve spent working on extending the logging mechanism of one of our applications to additionally log in JSON format which then can be used with logstash directly without the need of filtering the data. The log file generation took place in a vagrant box and was synced to the host system with a synced folder where logstash was watching for changes. The problem was that, although logstash found changes, nothing was parsed.

Published on 2014-11-12

Moving from one Jenkins instance to a fresh one (preserving configuration)

At my current project (.NET web application with Microsoft SQL Server) I am responsible for configuration management. For some time now we were using Jenkins for continuous integration and also for deployment of our test environments. Basically we had the following setup: Jenkins (master) Jenkins01 (slave) Jenkins02 (slave) Jenkins03 (slave) Every of the above mentioned machines (Jenkins03 is just a VM) is based on Windows Server 2008 with .

Published on 2014-08-11

Struggling with the wrong Ruby version

At work I’ve recently setup Dashing on an Ubuntu VM. I thought it would be nice to have a decent looking dashboard showing the build status and deployment times of our test environments. We are currently using Jenkins for CI and deployment which has a nice API to consume. Over time it turned out that many small fixes had to be made in the jobs (at the dashboard) to fit our environment perfectly.

Published on 2013-11-13

Switching the blog and language

On Monday a new blog system called Ghost was released to the public while being in a closed testing phase for several months after it was successfully backed on Kickstarter. I’ve immediately tried the first public version and was very impressed. It’s fast, clean and simple and has Markdown support out of the box unlike Wordpress which was kind of overloaded in my opinion. That motivated me to try it out on my Jiffybox.

Published on 2013-10-18

Erfahrungen mit DSL über Funk

Anno Magenta Niederjosbach. Ein kleines, ruhig gelegenes (viel zu ruhiges) und dennoch von der Infrastruktur her perfekt angebundenes Dorf. Nur bei der berühmten “Datenautobahn” hapert es gewaltig. Wenigstens gibt es hier seit vielen Jahren schon DSL, wenn auch geschwindigkeitstechnisch sehr bescheiden. Aber auch seit ebenso vielen Jahren verspricht die Telekom sogar in diesem “Kuhkaff” immer höhere Bandbreiten im Laufe der Zukunft. Einige Male schon bekamen wir diese Erhöhung zu spüren. Von DSL 1000 auf 2000, auf 3000, auf… und weiter?

Published on 2012-02-19

Ein Blog in Zeiten von Social Media?

Manch einer fragt sich vielleicht, weshalb man in Zeiten von Social Media und omnipräsenter Vernetzung noch einen (selbstgehosteten) Blog starten soll. Man kann doch genauso gut Inhalte über Facebook, Google+ oder Twitter verteilen. Nun, für mich sind diese Kanäle wirklich nur zur Verbreitung von Inhalten und nicht zum Bereitstellen selbiger. Auch ist man damit an die Anbieter mit ihren Regeln gebunden, was auch einschließt, dass Twitter bspw. nur 140 Zeichen zulässt oder Facebook 420.

Published on 2012-02-18