Now
Last update: 05 Sep 2023
Here’s what keeps me busy at the moment. what?
Enjoying (late) summer
The last few weeks have been packed with amazing activity, summer holidays with my wife, meeting friends and family, and generally having a good time and making the best out of this summer. I’m super grateful for living in a small town with so many good friends and family close by, with such a strong sense of community and tight-knit interaction. I hardly have any words to describe how great this feels and contributes to my well-being.
As summer’s back for a few more days here in northern Germany, I’m about to head out on a camping trip with my lads for a weekend and I’m sure we’re going to have a few great days of enjoying the outdoors, cooking together, having a few drinks, enjoying life and getting ready for summer to slowly fade into fall.
Life’s good.
👨💻 Side Projects
dotfiles - Geeking out over silly command-line tools
Yeah, I’m back at it. Every now and then I get this craving. A craving to fully geek out over clunky command line tools and waste hours tweaking, exploring, configuring, and optimizing my setup, especially the stuff revolving around command line tools.
This time I’m back at tweaking my tmux config a bit (see my blog posts on tmux if you want to dive into the rabbit hole head first). But more than that, I’m overhauling my vim (or neovim, really) config. While I usually had a very conservative approach to tweaking my vim configuration I decided to take kickstart.nvim for a spin this time and so far I love it. It comes with support for LSP (Language Server Protocol), Treesitter for fancy syntax highlighting, code navigation and editing, and SO MUCH MORE. It’s fun. For a very weird definition of “fun” that is.
Blog Overhaul
This blog starts to show its age. I’ve started exploring ways to overhaul it a little. I’ve been running off this current Jekyll-based incarnation since 2014. I don’t need much, really. A static site generator that can turn markdown files into blog posts is most I care about, really. Jekyll continues to be a fine tool for that job - but as with my dotfiles fiddling above, I’m probably looking for an excuse to try something new at this point. Starting from scratch sounds fun and would allow me to get rid of some junk that’s accumulated over the years while having an opportunity to experiment with new CSS and HTML features, a different static site generator, and maybe some delicately sprinkled client-side interactivity. Not sure where this is going, but my blog has always been a no-excuses outlet for me to experiment with things just for shits and giggles, and I think it will be fun to do more of that again.
📚 Reading
The last 3 books I’ve read, most recent at the top.
Endymion and The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons
After finishing the first two books of the “Hyperion Cantos” (which I really enjoyed) I wanted to finish the series. The last two books feel a little different than the first two, changing the main characters and forwarding the story by a few hundred years. It’s a somewhat different story with back-references to the first few books, but the story is nevertheless exciting and keeps me coming back for more. The worldbuilding is top notch and I’m having a great time with the entire “Cantos”.
Software Architecture: The Hard Parts by Neal Ford, Mark Richards, Pramod Sadalage and Zhamak Dehghani
I’m diving deep into software architecture at work and have been doing so for a good while now. This is not my first time diving deep into architecture questions and research, but it’s comforting to have a book at hand that reassures me that some of the things I think and do are not completely nuts on the one hand, and on the other hand is thought provoking and giving me pointers at things I should look at more deeply that I hadn’t considered before.
“Software Archutecture: The Hard Parts” goes into a lot of topics related to building large-scale (distributed) systems and drives one point home (a point I learned when I was at ThoughtWorks myself): Software architecture is all about trade-offs. There’s never a perfect solution. Nothing is ever completely obvious. If you optimize for one thing, you often inevitably sacrifice another thing. That’s how it goes, and balancing trade-offs for your specific needs is what it’s all about. A nice book with a lot of examples and case studies that I can recommend to anyone facing the challenge of breaking down or modernizing a larger-scale system. It doesn’t contain much ground-breakingly new but it’s a comforting read that helps put things into perspective and inspire with a few ideas and thoughts.