The Blog

I wanted my site to show which languages I am actually writing each week. Here is how I built a live chart from WakaTime data.

Meine Solaranlage sammelt im Minutentakt Hunderte Messwerte, aber die Hersteller-App machte zu wenig daraus. Also habe ich mein eigenes Echtzeit-Dashboard dafür gebaut.

BlurHash encodes a whole photo into a few dozen characters that render instantly as a blurred preview. Here is how I encode it in Rails and decode it in Vue.js.

Slow Docker builds cost me time and CI minutes on every commit. Baking all dependencies into a base image made mine two to three times faster.

Testing webhooks locally is tricky: the sender cannot reach your laptop behind a firewall. UltraHook provides a free tunnel for incoming POST requests, so you can debug them on your own machine.

Deploying a new Docker image by hand means logging in, pulling, restarting. With a Portainer webhook, every successful CI build deploys itself.

Hand-written API docs drift out of sync as the code changes. With OpenAPI and Rails you can generate them from the source instead, and there is more than one gem for the job.

Uploaded photos often carry the GPS coordinates of where they were taken, but Active Storage ignores them. So I wrote a small analyzer that extracts latitude, longitude and altitude from the Exif data.

Packing a compiled single-page app into a Docker image is easy. The harder part is making one image behave differently in staging and production without rebuilding it.

My Rails Docker image started at 1.6 GB. With an Alpine base and multi-stage builds I got it down to 329 MB.

Docker Hub had become the bottleneck in my pipeline: slow builds and large files shuffled across the Atlantic. Moving to GitLab's container registry fixed both.

Docker shut down Docker Cloud, leaving more than fifty of my containers without a home. I moved them to Portainer: lightweight, self-hosted, and easier to switch to than I expected.

This is not my first blog; the earlier ones quietly faded away. This time I want a lasting place to write about software development and what I learn along the way.