February 13, 2014
I love FS 2014 # It’s that day of the year again: Time to buy flowers and chocolate for your beloved one. However as with previous years, FSFE wants you to put the day to good use to also celebrate your favourite free software developer (you know, the people who get way more bug reports and complaints than positive feedback):
So here’s to the people over at Apache, Debian, Eclipse, Elasticsearch, Linux, ZeroMQ and the many other projects that make my life easier: Happy I love Free Software Day - get yourself celebrated!
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February 3, 2014
FOSDEM 2014 # By now FOSDEM turned into some kind of tradition in our family: Since 2007 every year in February we are travelling to that one comfy B&B in Brussels for a weekend - not to take a closer look at the city but to attend (together with thousands of other geeks and open source hackers) one of the biggest conferences on all things open source. I love the conference concept for scaling: As it happens on a university campus they only have a limited number of huge rooms, but a fairly large number of mid-sized and small rooms.
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February 1, 2014
On being aggressivly public # If it didn't happen on the mailing list it didn't happen at all. ... with all it's implications this seems to be the hardest lesson for newcomers to the Apache way of development to learn. In the minimal sense it means that any decision a project takes has to be taken publicly, preferably in some archived, searchable medium. In a wider sense it's usually interpreted as: .
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January 28, 2014
Scientific debugging - take 2 # Back in - OMG was that really back in 2010? - 2010 I wrote a post on scientific debugging. Today I was reminded of this post as I actually had the pleasure of watching this principle carried out - except this was for a medical “bug” instead of one in a piece of software. To quote the book Why programs fail the method of scientific debugging consists of 5 easy to follow steps:
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January 5, 2014
Children tinkering # Years ago I decided that in case I got the same question for at least three times I would write down the answer and put it somewhere online in a more or less public location that I can link to. The latest question I got once too often came from daddies (mostly, sorry - not even a handful of moms around me, let alone moms who are into tech) looking for ways to get there children in touch with technology.
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December 24, 2013
Don’t dream it, be it # After two years in a row of receiving 120 submissions for Berlin Buzzwords from the usual crowd - young, white, male, caucasian - only this year we decided we needed to work towards increasing diversity.One piece in the puzzle was to get in touch with several Berlin local “tech for non-tech” people groups. In a content exchange kind of setting I was asked to do an interview as some kind of role model.
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December 12, 2013
On geeks growing up # I’m a regular visitor of the Chemnitzer Linuxtage in March - at first going to talks learning lots of interesting stuff I didn’t know about like aspect oriented programming, strace, squeak, which open source licenses are best for different strategies. As of late I had been there mostly to help out with the FSFE booth. For context: The conference itself is hosted by the technical university in Chemnitz, it takes place on a weekend, they charge the tiny amount of 5 Euros for admission.
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December 2, 2013
Hello elasticsearch # First of all a disclaimer: I had a little bit of time left during the last few weeks. As a result my blog migrated from dynamic wordpress content to statically hosted pages. If anything looks odd, in case you find any encoding issues, if you miss specific functionality - please do let me know. I’ll switch from this beta url back to the old sub-domain in a week or so unless there are major complaints.
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November 13, 2013
Building online communities - from the 0MQ trenches # After seeing several talks on how open source communitites are organised at FOSDEM, on how to license open source software strategically at Chemnitzer Linuxtage and on how to nurture open source communities at Berlin Buzzwords over the past couple of years during the past year or so I’ve come to read quite a few articles and books on the art of building online communities.
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August 26, 2013
Wonder if you should switch from your RDBMS to Apache Hadoop: Don’t! # Last weekend I spend a lot of fun time at FrOSCon* in Sankt Augustin - always great to catch up with friends in the open source space. As always there were quite a few talks on NoSQL, Hadoop, but also really solid advise on tuning your system for stuff like MySQL (including a side note on PostgreSQL and Oracle) from Kristian Köhntopp.
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