I ordered the UHK with the linux layout as I thought that I will be moving towards a linux laptop as the main driver for my work. Somehow this didn’t happen 😕 and therefore I ended up using the UHK with a Mackbook Pro. Thus, I changed few settings and love my setup even more. UHK is really a spectacular keyboard. I quickly decided to just align the Fn, Ctrl, Option and Cmd key with the mac layout so that my mussle memory doesn’t suffer too much. Read more

I figured it’s time to write up the quickest guide about using the yubikey as the source of your ssh key. This assumes that: You have a yubikey and it’s in your usb port You’ve configured gpg on you machine (I’m running gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.7) You’re using the gpg-agent with enabled ssh support Here are the steps: gpg --card-edit > admin > generate > [enter the requested PIN] > quit And now you’re done. Read more

As you can see looking at the frequency of my posts, I’m more of an occasional writer. Therefore whenever I drag myself in front of my notebook, to write something up I’m feeling like sharing, I should really not have any reason to do something else instead. Sadly, although I was really happy with my octopress setup, more than once I found myself fighting the currently installed ruby versions and some conflicts with the gems that octopress was requiring. Read more

A while ago I wrote a ThoughtWorks insights post about the Backends for frontends pattern and the story behind its adaption at SoundCloud. It generated interesting discussions and resulted also in some further content and I thought it would be good to have a place with links to all this resources for the future reference. BFF @ SoundCloud - the original post talking about the pattern and journey towards it BFF pattern definition - comprehensive pattern definition Moving to Microservices at SoundCloud - Software Engineering Daily podcast - a podcast talking about microservices in gerneral, SoundCloud’s journey towards this style of architecture and usage of BFFs BFF @ SoundCloud (podcast) - an interview about UI composition in a microservices world in general and the BFF pattern

After we managed to set up our basic web application, let’s get our hands dirty writing some code. And as we want to do it in a test-driven manner (TDD), we need a proper test setup. This piece is all about our initial test pyramid. Test, what? Yes, pyramid: At the base of the test automation pyramid is unit testing. Unit testing should be the foundation of a solid test automation strategy and as such represents the largest part of the pyramid. Read more