The Blog

The language chart on my homepage is not a wish list. It comes straight out of WakaTime and shows what my editor really saw last week.

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

A whole photo, squeezed into a few dozen characters that render instantly as a blurred preview. Rails does the encoding, Vue.js the decoding.

Two to three times faster CI builds, and the trick is not clever caching. It is baking every dependency into a prepared base image once.

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 are already wrong by the time you merge. Three Rails gems generate them from the source instead, and they disagree about how.

Most photos your users upload know exactly where they were taken. Active Storage throws that away, so I wrote a small analyzer that keeps it.

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.