Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

💭 Thoughts: 2020-05

Welcome to the Thoughts section of my blog. Thoughts are better kept on my blog than on Twitter or other online platforms.


My own Static Site Generator

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Because I don’t have enough side projects yet, I started programming my own static site generator, with the creative name GoBlog. I doubt it will replace my use of Hugo in the near future, but it is exciting to write a Go program that is designed for high speed. I get to know features that I have never used before. I also learn what to pay attention to when thousands of files have to be parsed and processed concurrently. Maybe I will never be able to use this project for anything useful, but side projects are mainly there to have fun or learn something useful.

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Self-hosted server(less) functions

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One thing which I have never looked more closely at, but which I think is very interesting, are “Serverless Functions”, although they are not so serverless because they run on a server. Whatever. On Hacker News, I found a GitHub repository and an article about it.

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Time and focus

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It’s crazy how quickly time can pass when you get very engrossed in something. When it grabs you and you forget almost everything around you. When you’re in the flow.

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Habits

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I use one of my domains mainly for services that I use personally. My Miniflux instance for example. For a long time I ran Miniflux on a device from home, before I moved it to my virtual private server in the “cloud” a few weeks ago. To also adapt the subdomain I use for it to the scheme of the other subdomains, Miniflux now runs on a different subdomain than before. However, I have set up a redirection so that even if I enter the old subdomain, I will be redirected to the new one.

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Thoughts on owning my run data

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I use Strava as my tracking app on runs. I used to use Runtastic (now Adidas Running), but unfortunately there is no native app for my Samsung Galaxy Watch. But since Strava has now implemented some more restrictions for free users and I’ve been toying with the idea that I need a different system to own my run data (self-hosted) for a while anyway, I’ve now started to program something myself (as always when my desired solution doesn’t exist…).

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Corona-Warn-App

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The German government tasked SAP and Deutsche Telekom with the development of an open-source contact tracing app (named “Corona-Warn-App”) using the APIs from Google and Apple. Now they’ve published the code for the backend server. I took a quick look at the code and I’m quite a bit surprised about the quality and best practices used. They are using the Java-based Spring framework and use Postgres and minio to store data. Everything running in Docker. Even the Docker images are build using multi-stage Dockerfiles.

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GNOME’s games are awesome

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Updated on

I almost never play computer games, but what I sometimes like are classic logic games like Minesweeper or Sudoku. And I must say, the versions from GNOME (on Linux), GNOME Mines and GNOME Sudoku are really nice. Simple design, plain and focused on the game with the most important features. I have also just discovered on the GNOME Wiki that there are a number of other simple games available, like 2048, Four in a row or Chess (Chess is probably not so simple). I install most apps via Flatpak and Flathub, but most distributions should also have them directly in their repositories. The advantages of Flatpak are that it is very easy to install and you always get the latest version.

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Why I use a paid CDN

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To answer the question from an anonymous reader:

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Git is great

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After Kev Quirk was initially skeptical about Git and was desperate about using it, he finally made it thanks to community help and realized that Git is better than he thought:

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Microsoft Surface Go 2 and why I will NOT upgrade

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Microsoft today released Surface Go 2, the successor to the Microsoft Surface Go from 2018. All in all with few innovations, rather small improvements. The display edges have shrunk a bit, there is a model with a faster processor and the battery is a bit bigger. The Verge has published a video where they describe their first impressions of the new generation.

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Jan-Lukas Else