A discussion about Tailwind always gets heated. It's one of those polarising topics in web dev. Tabs vs. spaces. Utilities vs. semantic CSS, decoupling vs. tight coupling, etc. I made a mistake and recommended an article today about negative aspects of Tailwind without providing … | Continue reading
He was born in 1924. When Hitler seized power, he was 9 years old. He went to war with 16. I spent a lot of time with him and my grandma as a kid. We used to live next door to them for two years and later we visited them almost every week. I had sleepovers at my grandparents' hou … | Continue reading
Sometimes thoughts are formed by many tiny little sparks. Yesterday, I saw Frederico Viticci’s post about how he subscribed to a Pixelfed profile in Mastodon. There’s a form of excitement in his post that seems to resonate with a lot of people who liked or boosted it. Here's one … | Continue reading
Algo, algo on the wall … My thoughts currently circle around Twitter and Mastodon a lot. The migration of hundreds of thousands of users within just a few days created an explosion of posts, articles and discussions. It also triggerd quite a bit of self-reflection. How much are w … | Continue reading
Last September, we installed photovoltaic panels on our roof. We had plans for this for a couple years, but not the budget. After a bit more than a year, I wanted to write down a few numbers and thoughts for those who might be thinking about the same step. Disclaimer I'm 100% awa … | Continue reading
Despite growing pains and potential problems, I think this could be one of the most interesting movements on the web in recent years. Let’s see where it goes. I’m getting the same vibe as Bastian about Mastodon: Suddenly there was this old Twitter vibe. Real conversations. Rea … | Continue reading
I'm on my way to Nottingham for a Kirby workshop and to attend Simon Collison's fantastic New Adventures Conference for the second time and this is my "travel diary" of a quite unusal journey. Dear diary … I've visited this conference for the first time in 2011 and it was a very … | Continue reading
It started last spring. Something didn't feel right. It was exceptionally dry for weeks. We have a 3600-liter cistern for our small garden that was already empty. It would normally fill up from time to time and get us over the summer. But not that year. What started as a long per … | Continue reading
I killed my personal site in May 2018. It was the GDPR month of horror. Dozens of old clients approached me to help them get their privacy policies online. I was knee-deep into getting our own privacy policy for Kirby ready with our lawyer and everything just felt like shit. Inst … | Continue reading
I follow the battles between developer guilds for quite a while and now and then I post my own snarky remarks on Twitter about the latest JS frameworks to join the club. It's too easy to get dragged into grumpy-mode these days. Articles like the satire about How it feels to learn … | Continue reading
There's a "startup" idea, I'm carrying with me for quite a while. This tweet by Tobias Tom convinced me to finally write a bit about it. I love audio books and I love podcasts. It's a rather young love. I'm a late-bloomer when it comes to audio content. Unfortunately I find very … | Continue reading
While being a designer/developer still feels like the most fulfilling thing I can currently imagine as a job, the last 14 years of being a freelancer in this industry brought quite some low times in which I wasn't sure if this is something I could do forever. Especially the last … | Continue reading
My name is Bastian and I am an addict. I confess that I spend too much time with my smart phone. More time than I actually want to spend with it. It often reminds me of my time as a smoker. In the end of my "smoking career" I smoked more unnecessary cigarettes than necessary – if … | Continue reading
1984 is here but we move on with our daily routines. Who cares anyway? Our hard drives are manipulated: boring. Our SIM cards are being hacked: yawn. Smart TVs record private conversations and send them to a third party service for analysis: so what? Do you even remember that Sno … | Continue reading
I'm carrying this around with me for quite some time. Why is there no Wikipedia for news? Well, actually there is, but it's just a sad try to replicate the idea of Wikipedia and apply it to news. The biggest issue with news is trust. Which news source is in all their subjectivity … | Continue reading
I saw the Mailbox beta launch the other day and felt this urge to get on board. I was excited like in the old days when new apps and services made me nervous like a little kid before christmas. But somewhere deep inside it didn't feel true anymore. I stopped my "early-adopter car … | Continue reading
I'm working on Kirby 2 for almost two years now. It started as a small wish to make the first version a bit better and has become a major personal effort, which takes all my time and concentration. It's no longer about iterating over the first version. I'm under constant pressure … | Continue reading
Just like the ebb and flow, trends in webdesign come and go. Some of them set the foundation for future trends, some are just one-hit wonders. Butterflies following the mouse, scroll effects, textures, shadows, rounded corners, bubbly buttons, bouncy animations, cards, material d … | Continue reading
When I started learning how to write code, I always wondered why there are thousands of books on how to get started or being a master, but nothing in between. It's a bit like those two-step How to draw… jokes, which start with a circle and end with an entire hand in step two. It … | Continue reading
At this year's beyond tellerrand Stephen Hay was giving a talk which influenced my last two months significantly. He was speaking about simplicity. Since this talk I'm haunted by a single thought: Start a new project as simple as it can get and only add things if you really need … | Continue reading
I spent a big part of my childhood in our basement — no reason to call the police. I loved to waste entire days at my father's workbench, taking old electric devices apart with my best friend, not being able to assemble them again and building our own little gadgets for our treeh … | Continue reading