Posts

This post is about the awesome git worktree, that simplified my personal workflow with git very much. In the past I had at least 2 versions of repository checked out locally or fiddled around with git stash to find a thing I did weeks ago. But let’s talk about how I use git and how git worktree helped me. Use Cases When I’m reviewing a Pull or Merge Request, sometimes I would like to see the code in my own IDE instead of the GitLab or GitHub UI. Normally I have a single clone of a repository on my local machine and I’m in the process of adding new features or fixing a bug myself. So I don’t want to commit things just yet, but just check out another branch. I know I could use git stash or create a WIP commit and then amend by providing a good commit message later, but almost all the time I forget about my existing stash or the earlier WIP commit. ...

I recently finished my studies, so this seems a good time to reflect about how (and why) things worked out. As always I like to share some insights in what I’ve learned in the last 5 years. This is the second part of my series about how to study. You can find the first part about how to write a thesis here Studying is more than about learning new things. It is also about learning how to prioritize your available time and energy to achieve externally set goals. And often these goals are not very specific, but rather vague and open to exploration. In this post I’ll present my Kanban inspired workflow to keep track of what I have to do within the semester and hand in all assignments in time. ...

I had the chance to speak at a small conference at my home university about the project (goSDN) I did work on the last 6 months. This is also the project I worked on while writing my thesis, therefore I was pretty confident I had enough insides to answer most of the questions. I thought about speaking at a conference before, but most of the time I felt like I couldn’t provide much insight in topics or my understanding of the technology I used simply wasn’t deep enough. But this conference was the perfect opportunity to change this! The conference was rather small with about ~200 attendees, and it was at my home university, so I had good chances of getting accepted as speaker. Which actually happened, so I had a few weeks to prepare the presentation. ...

LaTeX is a software for document preparation. You write your content in plain text .tex files, much like a very basic programming language, and compile it afterwards in the designated format, e.g. pdf. LaTeX is heavily used in academia as it provides an easy way to express mathematical formulae. Besides that most universities provide a template, so you don’t have to think about margins, citation style (and more) and can simply focus on your content. And this is exactly the reason why I use LaTeX. ...

There are existing services like pingdom or uptimerobot to check if your network services are up and running. But as always I like to be independent of service providers and host as much by myself as possible. So let’s build our own uptime monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, alertmanager and the Prometheus blackbox-exporter. The general idea is to check if a service is up with the blackbox-exporter. Then scrape this metrics with Prometheus and store it for further usage. Build a simple dashboard with Grafana for visualization and finally setup alerting with alertmanager. As this uses a few projects on the Prometheus ecosystem, this is a perfect example on how to integreate these different components. ...