Blog, but filtered for Notes

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  1. as note

    I Turned Slack <s>Off</s> for a Week.

    Katie Womersley: “(…) our global spread means almost 24/7, Slack is a hub of activity and people feel they’re missing out on work. This is especially tough on our Asia-Pacific teammates, who end up left out of discussions and conversations, and folks with responsibilities who needed to work different hours and be offline during parts of their workday (like parents!).” I’m so familiar with this …
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    ☕️ New Espresso Machine 🚀

    Here we go, that’s my new Espresso machine, a Rocket Giotto v3 together with a Mazzer Mini B grinder. After years with my still beloved and quite satisfying Saeco Aroma which stays with me since over 8 years now, I decided to level up a bit. I’m still very new to the new machines and it’s certainly different to my previous machine. The espresso tastes totally different to what I’m used to (much …
  3. as note

    Dear Flattr, <strong>bye bye!</strong>

    Flattr just announced they’re now part of eyeo, makers of AdBlock Plus. Time to say goodbye, and no it’s mainly due to a different reason. When Flattr announced their revamped product yesterday via email, they also announced that they’re now part of eyeo (they seem to already be, without notifying anyone earlier). That’s a huge bummer as the makers of AdBlock Plus are a highly questionable …
  4. as note

    Which Tech Giant Would You Drop? <strong>Here’s my take.</strong>

    There’s a very well written quiz on the New York Times. It’s called: “The Big Five tech companies increasingly dominate our lives. Could you ditch them?”—and here’s my public response and some thoughts on it. This note is inspired by Jeena’s post on this topic, in which he shares his personal result list. My order of dropping tech giants First of all, note that this isn’t an order of relevance …
  5. as note

    <strong>Good Services Are Never Free</strong>

    “B2B SaaS pricing is out of control. Everyone is pricing their service for endlessly-funded startups or enterprise.”— Jonnie Hallmann on Twitter Maybe—just a thought—Venture Capital isn’t spread everywhere anymore. Maybe startups need to finally think about having a sustainable business model and maybe that is why so many services start to charge more money than we’re used to. If you need Circle …
  6. as note

    On “<a href=" http://www.michaelbromley.co.uk/blog/529/why-i-havent-fixed-your-issue-yet&quot;&gt;Why I Haven’t Fixed Your Issue Yet</a>”

    Tobias Tom sent me this article over the weekend and I really liked to read it. Michael Bromley shares good points in why maintaining open source projects is so hard, while creating projects is very easy. He acknowledges that an open source author has “taken on a small portion of responsibility to you as a user of my code”, and points out one of the most important facts that users of open source …
  7. as note

    Get your <strong>HTTP Status Code</strong> Right

    Today I noticed that a couple of big websites do prevent me from checking a URL’s HTTP Status Code via curl. See the following header response from a Medium-served custom-domain (doesn’t happen with medium.com URLs): curl -I https://shift.newco.co/how-a-single-conversation-with-my-boss-changed-my-view-on-delegation-and-failure-ae5376451c8d HTTP/1.1 409 Conflict Error 409: The request could not be …
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    Twitter <strong>Detox</strong>

    As of today, I decided to put both my accounts to a “private” state. This means only people that I follow and that follow me will be able to read my tweets. It’s the result of a small and unimportant harassment incident that made me realize how shitty the service really is when you need support. A week ago I received my first harassment tweet by a politically differently oriented person. In …
  9. as note

    <strong>Setting up S/MIME</strong> on macOS Sierra & iOS

    Setting up S/MIME is actually not that hard. That said, it’s probably still too nerdy for a normal user so this type of email encryption is likely not something for non-technical people. You need a Email certificate by an authority Of course you could create a certificate yourself but then no one would trust this manually so it’d be useless. However, there are a very few providers that offer …
  10. as note

    Open Research Funding in Web Development

    With 16500 email readers and tens of thousands readers online, my WDRL project seems to be of big interest for many people. Understandable if we take into account how hard it is to keep up to date with web development technology. But how is this continuous research project financed? Mostly by myself. And that’s a problem. After four in terms of acceptance successful years, my project is still …
  11. as note

    Peter Thiel’s <strong>Influence</strong>

    What we often overlook is the influence of individual people on companies and even us. With Peter Thiel’s support for Donald Trump, we need to reflect our decisions online again, and finally need to draw the necessary conclusions. Many of us in the web development industry indirectly live of Peter Thiel’s money. We use Facebook, we use PayPal, we use Salesforce, we use Asana, Stripe, OpenTable, …
  12. as note

    <strong>Notes</strong> on “Managing Dedicated Time-Off And Vacation”

    I’m crappy at managing my vacation and forcing myself to rest. Don’t get me wrong, until I realize the truth, I think I’m good at this. Last weekend I suffered from health issues, and it’s still not entirely away. I don’t know exactly what’s the matter but reflecting on the roots of this, I realized that something has been very wrong for quite some time now. I claim to have an amazing life — …
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    Putting ourselves <strong>into Perspective</strong> as Developers.

    We spend hours, days into developing a small component of a complex web app but don’t appreciate a craftsman spending hours to fix our radiator. How weird is that? Let’s put ourselves into perspective more often and appreciate other people’s work. Why do we as people tend to overrate our own work while not appreciating other peoples’ work? Why would web development be better work and better paid …
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    <strong>Notes</strong> on “The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism”

    In WDRL 136 I added an article to the “Going beyond” section called “ The Mental Disease of Late-Stage Capitalism”. As I got some very interesting reply via email and I decided to publish it so others can read this as well. Hi, Just a quick note about some of the "Going beyond ..." articles you have promoted. You should be careful about conflating capitalism with whatever economic system is …
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    The WDRL Evergreen List

    I’d like to announce the immediate availability of The Evergreen List. It’s a hand-picked selection of resources from the weekly digests that are important for a longer time. Why does The Evergreen List exist? This additional list has been created so that people can find very important, all-time relevant content easier. You could also see this as the filter for the filtered weekly lists that only …
  16. as note

    On “What are CSS Modules and why do we need them?”

    I long hesitated to comment on the “CSS Modules” tool, but seeing an article on CSS-Tricks about it, in it some fundamentally flawed assumptions and arguments, I want to shortly add some thoughts to it. CSS Modules takes a different approach. Instead of writing plain HTML, we need to write all of our markup in a JavaScript file, like index.js. This is the first and main issue I have with the …
  17. as note

    On Cloudflare’s “The Trouble with Tor”

    Last week, Cloudflare published an article headlined with “The Trouble with Tor”. The whole post was caused by protesters who complained about Cloudflare’s strict Tor policy. The default setting for user’s sites is to ‘block’ Tor traffic and ask people to solve a Google Captcha. While this is not blocking access to a site in a traditional way for most people, it is indeed a complete block for …
  18. as note

    Notes On My Conference Year 2015

    For me, 2015 has been quiet regarding conferences I attended. After years with many events I needed a break from seeing all the same things over and over again (which is only a bad thing when you attend too many events). TEDx Munich In November, I attended TEDx Munich and it was amazing. They achieved a great mix of speakers, very good diversity (speakers, attendees) and after a every two to …
  19. as note

    Consumer Behavior

    Last week I read a few things about saving energy. It turns out that our consumer behavior is broken. It’s not reasonable to replace your old TV with a new one to save energy. Because you’re not. Your old one needs to be recycled. But instead it’s sent to Africa where people suffer from tearing down the toxic material in it. “Don’t buy more than what you need. Fast fashion consumption is not …
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    TEDx Munich 2015

    I stumbled over the event just two weeks ago. The TEDx Munich 2015 which had the title “Hidden Treasures”. Until now, I only have known TED talks from videos and I have seen extraordinarily great ones over the past years. Curious but knowing how much TED Events cost, I read that the independently organized Munich event was only 140EUR for the ticket. Not knowing a single speaker made me to …