What did I do the last 3 Weeks? The last 3 weeks passed very quickly, and I thought I had nothing to say. But there is something. 😅 With my current client, I'm switching between 2 notebooks. My MacBook Pro and the Windows Thinkpad from my client. When I'm done working for my client, I usually don't have the motivation to sit on my MacBook to do something. I even leave tax matters lying around and don't process them. But when I have the motivation, I work on my private side project, on which I will tell more, when the next milestone is completed.

The Good

📀 I've started buying 4k Blu-rays of movies I really like and watched more than 2–3 times. Just because, often, I had this problem, that I wanted to watch the movie, but it was not on a streaming service, I pay for. I know it is not a minimalistic way, which I try to live as far as possible. But for me, it is Ok collecting stuff, I love.

🧑‍💻 There is progress on my client's project. I'm now able to work in some way. 😅 I completed the first tickets and worked out some new tickets where I clean up the project and refactor parts, to get a better developer experience. It is the first project where I didn't have a real onboarding session. The one responsible for this project left without a word or documentation. So I'm on my own here. Which is in some way also quite fun. The only downer here is that I have to use Windows and can't install neovim, because of some policy. 🤷

🦖 We as a family visited the Jurassic World Exhibition in Berlin. Really impressive what they created there. Sure, as an adult you saw that it was not real, but they did a real good job on keeping up the illusion. Only the last part, where a T-Rex escaped, was rushed and ended in the merch store. It ended when you realized what really happened there. But nevertheless, it was good and I can recommend it.

🔥 I've made some progress on my private app project. The last milestone I've completed added some new features which put the project in a presentable state. Now I'm working on the next milestone, which will prepare everything for a small test release. Working on the last milestone also led to some ideas for new posts. Now I need time to write them. 😅

🏋️ After making my 15 min Kettlebell workout, I've tried a new workout, which is 20 min long and exhausting. I feel awesome after the workout, exhausted but in a good way. Let's see when this will get normal, and I have to look for a new one, to boost my workout. Maybe I can increase the weight of the kettlebell, which is 12 kg at the moment.

📊 I've added pirsch.io tracking to my blog: https://bruegge.dev/add-pirsch-io-tracking-to-write-as

🤘 After ~5 Weeks of not going to any concert, I was at a concert to see Escuela Grind and Rotten Sound: https://bruegge.dev/escuela-grind-und-rotten-sound-in-reset-club-berlin

The Bad

🤒 I'm kind of sick for more than a 1 week, not too sick to stay in bed, but sick enough to feel unwell by everything I'm doing. At the time of completing this post, I'm feeling way better. I hope this will last some time. 😅

The Ugly

😠 It will hunt me until it has an ending, going every day to the kindergarten to bring and pick up my oldest makes me feel unwell. Seeing the people responsible for rejecting the youngest drives me crazy. I'm not that kind of person who can deal with something like that very well. And I see no escape, besides waiting for the next year to come, where the oldest will be going to school, and we don't have to deal with this kindergarten anymore.

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Write.as has the option to add custom CSS and JS to the site. Write.as has also basic tracking for the posts and how they are performing. But it is just basic tracking and only for the last 30 days. So I wanted a bit more. For private projects, I use prisch.io. Which is privacy-friendly and hosted in Germany. I will try this out. If it is not working as expected, I will remove the script.

How can you implement such a script?

First, go to your pirsch.io Dashboard and click the + Icon on the top-right.

You will be asked between Client or Server implementation. Go to Client implementation and copy the script tag.

<script defer src="https://api.pirsch.io/pa.js"
    id="pianjs"
    data-code="YOUR_SITE_CODE"></script>

Now, transfer this HTML into JavaScript. Here we create a new element and add it to the document <head />.

// Add prisch tracking --- START
const script = document.createElement('script');
script.setAttribute('id', 'pianjs');
script.setAttribute('defer', true);
script.setAttribute('src', 'https://api.pirsch.io/pa.js');
script.setAttribute('data-code', 'YOUR_SITE_CODE');
document.head.appendChild(script);
// Add prisch tracking --- END

This snipped can be added to your write.as blog. Go to your write.as Dashboard and select the Customize Button. Here is an area where you can add custom JavaScript.

Hit “Save changes” and reload your blog. The script should now be added. :)

I hope this will help someone.

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🪣 Wow, more than 6 weeks since my last link dump post. But I like how this is going. I collect the links over time and revisit them later to write something about them. Some of them I hve totally forgotten by now. 😅

3 Vim commands for blazingly fast navigation between brackets: you can always learn something new. After +10 years of vim/neovim, I didn't know these little gems, mostly 2 and 3. 1 is a long time goto for me. Link: https://m4xshen.dev/posts/vim-commands-for-navigation-between-brackets/

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float: Lately, we had this topic where an iceberg is not floating like you know it from movies, where you see just the tip and the rest is underneath, like for example, a bottle half filled with water. This little game illustrates it nicely, how an ice could actually float. Link: https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

Show distances of a map by time instead of space: I really like the Idea behind this. The Author also hast a Video where he explains everything about the idea. Link: https://spacetime-maps.vercel.app/

Price Per Part for Lego Sets: A little Lego geeking here. Link: https://brickinsights.com/statistics/ppp

Breaking Down Tasks: I had a nice read with this post, also the other posts from this author are good reads. This is how I have tried to tackle my tasks for some years now, and it works good enough, I think. Sometimes I'm a bit too lazy to work out the details, this is where my estimates are not the best ones. 😅 Link: https://jacobian.org/2024/mar/11/breaking-down-tasks/

Rethinking the startup MVP: Building a competitive product: Another good read. Link: https://linear.app/blog/rethinking-the-startup-mvp-building-a-competitive-product

Refactoring.Guru makes it easy for you to discover everything you need to know about refactoring, design patterns, SOLID principles, and other smart programming topics: This is a site I check out from time to time and read about some topics, mostly about design patterns. Just to verify that I still could explain a term. Link: https://refactoring.guru/

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This will be a short one. ⚡

The Good

🏡 The facade of our house is finally done.

🎮 I was able to play some hours on my PS5. Currently, I'm testing the game Outward which I bought on a Sale and I have some fun with it. 😊

🤘 No concerts in the past 2 weeks. 😅

The Bad

🕰️ Currently it feels strange, I need to do part-time work for my current client, but I find less time to write or do work on my side project. Turns out, while we are both working, my wife and me, it is harder to also take care of the little one.

🧑‍💻 I'm still not able to work properly on my new client's project. Because there was no real handover, and I have to figure out how my precursor has done all the things. Sadly, basic things like npm start or a simple docker build && docker run are not working because of some window's administration settings. But I'm getting closer to a working environment with each step.

The Ugly

😠 Each day, going to the Kindergarten stresses me out every time I see the teachers there. Pretending everything is nice while lied in your face.

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Recently, I needed to convert plenty of images from jpeg to webp. For tasks like this, I like to use the shell. In my case, bash.

The one-liner I've used to batch covert the images is the following: fd -e jpg --exec cwebp {} -o webp/{.}.webp

To get all my images, I've used fd, an alternative to the default find command. Both can do the job, but I prefer fd because of the simpler syntax.

And to convert the images, there is cwebp. I don't know if there are alternatives, this is the first I've found in my search, and it did the job well. 😊

In the end, I've saved ~90% of the file size, which is quite impressive. 🚀

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The Good

🧑‍💻 A giant relief was that I was able to close everything related to my old client's project. I did a good Handover and completed all my last tasks. I can't really say something bad about the last client, but you feel it, when you are not honestly welcome there but need to get some work done. At least I can say I've learned some new things about people's behavior in the last 1,5 years.

🏡 Constant progress in the garden and on the house. I was able to flatten some sand to prepare the ground for new lawn. Got some new information's how I could make better use of lawn tractor to save some muscle work.

🐰 There were some relaxing days over the Easter holidays, which helped a lot to gain some new energy.

🏗️ I finally had time to work on my side project and completed a good chunk of tasks. I hope a can now work more on it and open it for tests.

🍿 I've rewatched Pacific Rim and for me, it is a masterpiece, one of those movies I can watch over and over again. Still visually stunning after more than 10 years. I turn into a kid again with these kinds of movies. 😍

The Bad

🧑‍💻 Starting on my new client projects feels very slow because I have to do courses, which is not bad, but the courses are not very helpful. I don't have a real working environment at the moment (working on citrix). And I don't have access to environments I need to work on some tickets and code. I get why that environment is so locked, but it is difficult to get started. Even worse, when the responsible people are sick and everything takes even more time.

The Ugly

🤨 The last week was quite hard, ending one project while starting a new one while having the little one at home to take care of while my wife was working onsite on her project.

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It feels that most of my post are related to music and concerts. Yes, currently I write a lot about it, but in the last 3 Months, I was on more concerts than in the past 5 years. 😅 My original plan for this blog was to write about me, development and freelance stuff. But It's fine for me to write about other topics, as long as I can practice writing. 👍

One reason was/is time. In the past 5 years, we've got 2 kids and there was not much time to go to concerts. Another reason was Covid, which I don't need to explain.

Especially the march was a concert heavy month with 5 concerts. It was a hard month, also because of other stuff going on, but the concerts were worth the effort. :)

One reason I got back into concerts was a good friend who dragged me a bit into it again. And I'm happy about it.

Something like this concert-march was a bit too much. I will continue to go to concerts, but not as often anymore.

The next planned concerts will be: – Asinhell on June 18 – Better Lovers on July 5 – Sepultura on November 22 – Kreator, Anthrax and Testament on December 8

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Today, again a summary of 2 weeks. This time there is a bit more to say. :)

The Good

🤘 I was at 3 concerts in 1 week, Botch and Heavysaurus, The Halo Effect and Meshuggah. Quite an endeavor, but it made a lot of fun. The Heavysaurus concert was also the second together with my oldest child.

🏡 We made good progress in and around our house. In the following weeks we will get heaters in the Cellar. ~50% of the walls a painted and the rest is waiting to get plastered. Outside the house, we finally got rid of our sand heap, which was there for around 4 years. After getting rid of all our hedges, there was room to fill in the sand.

🏗️ In Week 11 I've signed a new contract for my next development project. In Week 12 I started with a soft onboarding because there were colleagues on vacation.

📈 Some weeks ago, I've opened a depot and bought some ETFs (ISHSIII-CORE MSCI WLD DLA) to get familiar with this topic. I bought them at the right time, where they had a high. 😅 I need to take some more time and explore this topic more to get the best out of it.

The Bad

👶 The Kita rejected our blind child after promising they will take care of him from August on. When I heard it, I was paralyzed and speechless. This made my furious. We did all we can to support them with it. We got one-to-one support and had support from all the authorities, and still, they rejected him.

🧑‍💻 Currently, with all the stuff ongoing on our house and with the kids, there is not much time for me to program on my side projects. Let's see what eastern would bring. Maybe some time. 😂

🤖 I've fucked up my paperless-ngx installation again. And again, I didn't make a backup. After I re-added my documents and tags, I need to force me to make a backup and think about a periodic solution. ☝️

🪟 I haven't used Windows since XP. Sometimes in a VM to Test webpages with Internet Explorer, but I never installed it on a physical machine. So I thought I will never get a Project which completely is tied to Microsoft and Windows. Sure, in the past, you had Teams and all the office and Azure stuff, but Windows? I thought this was a thing of the past. Let's see how this is going, after 9–10 years of Linux and 1 year of Mac as a Freelancer.

The Ugly

😠 I'm furious and feel a lot of hate for the Kita people responsible for rejecting our blind child. I don't want to feel like this, it makes me sad, but at them moment I don't know how I should handle this. Especially when you have to go to the Kita every day and leave your oldest child there. For him, you have to pretend that everything is fine, but inside you could scream at these people. It's hard because they put you in this spot out of egoism and maybe fear of changing their daily life for no reason… But I think we have to get used to this because this will not be the last time we are confronted with something similar. It makes me so sad because he is such a lovely child with a lot of joy to live.

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Since I didn't find the time to complete the post for Week 9, it will be covering the last 2 weeks.

The Good

First things first, I was on Hackernews. 😲 Thanks to “jethronethro” for posting. This was quite unexpected and makes me happy.

Here is a Screenshot.

I got a new Project. 🥳 The current project fades out in March, and I'm happy that I can continue with my work for another client in mid-March.

Finally, I saw Wormrot while they Played with Napalm Death: https://bruegge.dev/campaign-for-musical-destruction-tour-2024-factory-magdeburg

The Bad

This should be written in “The Good” Part, but somehow, I'm not feeling it, putting it there. On March 10, we saw Dune Part 2, and I'm not as happy I thought I would be, after watching the Movie. Maybe I write a Post about it later.

The Ugly

Nothing. The last 2 Weeks were good, and I'm happy. 😊

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🪣 I've decided to create a link dump series. I don't know how often I will do it, I'll just create a draft #2 and add links to it, until I find, it is postable. And after it, with #3 and #4 etc. 😄

Kettlebell Workout: lately I trimmed down my workout to a 15 min kettlebell only workout.

Alternative Reddit Frontend: for me, as someone who only reads on Reddit, I like this approach a lot. I don't need to log in and have a fast interface. :) https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib

The Story of Final Fantasy 7 explained (German): Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth was released, and I thought about, getting the game, but then I was too lazy to buy it. And currently, I have no time to play it. So, I didn't buy it. 😅 As someone who played the original a lot, I found this Video a good refresher and also a good summary of the whole story. Everyone interested in the Final Fantasy lore should watch this. And sorry that it is in German. Just got it from a friend who shared it with me.

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