Introducing a Graphical User Interface for Gopass

March 27, 2019 • Security

Gopass is “the slightly more awesome standard unix password manager for teams”. It combines the powers of Git and GPG and therefor it’s purely command line based. That’s great, don’t get me wrong. However, non-technical people in teams also need access to lots of credentials. Read more

Problem Solutions and Tricks for Cassandra Cluster Manager

February 11, 2019 • Java

Cassandra Cluster Manager (CCM) is a helpful tool for running local Cassandra clusters. Especially if you need some exotic configuration, DataStax Enterprise clusters or simply don’t want to use Docker. CCM is a command line based Python application that lets you download, maintain and operate such clusters. Unfortunately it is not very robust and prone to errors on different environments. In addition in inherits problems from Cassandra itself since it’s just functioning as a wrapper around Cassandra source code. Read more

Video Platform Networks Earning Money with Young Children's Viewtime

February 3, 2019 • Internet

Recently Twitter was amused by people posting strange YouTube videos for children which went viral. These were showing repetitive patterns of cheap 3D-modelled animals walking around, getting colored and making animal noises. On first sight it was fun. Looking at the amounts, views, patterns and contents of these videos, reveals that there is something disgusting going on. Read more

How to dump SQL from a H2 database file

August 9, 2018 • Databases

Recently I ran into the situation that I had to migrate a file basd H2 database to another relational database. At the beginning I was kind of scared that there will be no proper and quick solution. After a bit of research I found a very easy way that I would like to share with you. We also need to have Java installed and get a little utility from H2. Read more

How to fix DevCenter freezing on new Java versions

July 6, 2018 • Java

Shortly after updating my system Java version to 8.0.172 I realised that Datastax DevCenter was not working anymore. It just freezed immediately after loading and didn’t react to input anymore. Read more

(GER) Herr Mies will's wissen #9 – Bitcoin Podcast

October 11, 2017 • Blockchain

Daniel Mies, one of my great workmates at codecentric AG, invited me to join his German podcast “Herr Mies will’s wissen” for an episode on an introduction to Bitcoin. As I worked pretty much with Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency related analysis the past months, I of course accepted and joined Daniel. More than half an hour we had a nice talk about it on a pretty basic level. For all of you guys that want to understand what Bitcoin basically is about, this episode might be interesting. Read more

Decentralized Autonomous Organization – Organizations on the Blockchain

September 1, 2017 • Blockchain

Decentralized Autonomous Organization is a new kind of organization that emerged from the blockchain technology. It’s a way of organizing various stakeholders, their financial interactions and processes that can be used in the organization. Read more

Storj – Decentralized Cloud Storage on the Blockchain

July 21, 2017 • Blockchain

Some days ago I published an introduction to Blockchain and what it could be used for (Blockchain, the next big thing?). Yet there are already a lot of startups building interesting products with this kind of technology. Read more

What is Blockchain? Is it the next big thing?

July 18, 2017 • Blockchain

Blockchain fuels digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum and a lot more. FinTech companies and startups started to utilize Blockchain to disrupt the classic financial industry. Also more institutes and governments are doing research and start interesting projects. Read more

Utilizing Keyboard Shortcuts like a Pro

May 25, 2017 • Productivity

As a software developer you always have a big choice of kind of skills in which you can improve yourself. Most of them are pretty complex, require you to learn new concepts and paradigms. Some on the other hand are basic and have touch points with the majority of our working time. As always, we should go for the low hanging fruits to improve ourselves. Today: Learning and using keyboard shortcuts as a developer – Probably also interesting for everyone else working with text. Read more

Documenting Spring REST APIs with Swagger

January 28, 2017 • Java

When working in a context where services communicate to each other over REST, it is quite helpful to properly document those APIs. Especially when services are developed and maintained by different teams it saves time and confusion to provide a single entry point for REST API documentation. Read more

Elegant Basic Auth with the Spring RestTemplate

January 27, 2017 • Java

Communication via HTTP calls is a very common task for Spring applications in times of service oriented and microservice architectures. To secure services from unwanted access, HTTP Basic Access Authentication is a simple and sufficient (assuming usage of HTTPS) strategy. Read more

Migrating from Fish Shell to Zsh

December 26, 2016 • Productivity

I’ve been using Fish Shell for MacOS for about four years before I finally decided to switch to Zsh. Why? I was simply annoyed to Fishs incompatibilities with Bash commands. Remembering another syntax for setting and exporting environment variables and missing support for the && operator were the top of the iceberg. Read more

Documenting Your Knowledge in Large Projects

October 12, 2016 • Documentation

Everyone of us knows the pain of bad or missing documentation. It’s a critical element for onboarding, knowledge transfer and knowledge conversation within a software project. If you’re in a five person team, tasks are done asynchronously and there are quite a few repositories, modules, services or however you call it, there is no way without documentation. You must fill the gap of missing knowledge of your colleagues to craft good software. Read more

I'm up and running!

September 3, 2016 • General

Welcome to my personal blog. I will post about IT related stuff here. You can expect solutions to common problems, experiences I made with certain technologies or just my loud thoughts about new developments in the IT and software area. Read more

Spring Data queries using the JPA Criteria API

April 11, 2016 • Java

Spring has nice features for data persistence and gives you simple data access abstractions. Standard queries in Spring Data repositories are easy but when it comes to complex queries, people tend to use the @Query annotation. For some cases, it is complex to write these queries. Therefor I prefer the JPA Criteria API and how to improve complex queries using that. Read more

Apache Web Server: 8 Tipps to secure your server

February 6, 2016 • Security

In year 2016 Apache runs 50% of all websites on the internet. More than 440.000 new websites are launched daily while about 45.000 are hacked again that day. Not relevant for your site? Please think again. We will show you how to configure your freshly obtained hosting package or server with a secure Apache server. Read more