Blog

Here are the things I write. If you like, subscribe to my RSS feed.

How we read

A List Apart article by Jason Santa Maria, Aug 5, 2014

We are building a house

Our weed-covered land is starting to transform. This house project might take a time of nearly ten years in the end. We bought the property …

Weeknotes 29

Utopia is an algorithm to calculate fluid type size for responsive websites. It´s made by James Gilyead and Trys Mudford. There’s no program or dependency …

Weeknotes 26

“The mystery font that took over Ney York” is an article about Choc, a typeface designed by Roger Excoffon. Choc specimen cover, 1955. Paul Robert Lloyd, independent …

Weeknotes 25

I published markdown-it-fitmedia, a markdown-it plugin to set aspect-ratio of responsive images, make images lazy loading, and to make videos responsive. Use it in the …

Open air bathing

Open air bathing is possible again (with some corona-constraints)

markdown-it-fitmedia

A markdown-it plugin to set aspect-ratio of responsive images, make them lazy loading, and to make videos responsive.

Weeknotes 22

Reading “The Details” by Matthias Ott. convertacolor.com is a minimalistic yet quick way of converting hex, rgb, hsl, and cmyk colors in any direction. I migrated my …

My favorite Yoga flows

Yoga Ganzkörper Flow | Bauch, Beine & Balance | 30 Minuten für Kraft & Stabilität Power Vinyasa Yoga für Kraft & Willensstärke | 25 Minuten Home …

Fluid videos with my adaption of FitVids

Embedded videos are not automatically responsive or fluid. They come with a fixed setting for width and height. To make them responsive while keeping aspect …

The 10 Principles of Good Design

Dieter Rams The 10 Principles of Good Design as stated by Dieter Rams: Good design is innovative. The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. …

Weeknotes 18

This week I pushed my little website a step further by enhancing the service worker to pre-cache selected pages and by runtime-caching images as well …

Helvetica

A documentary film by Gary Hustwit

Google Webfonts Helper ★

Mario Ranftl has written the Google Webfonts Helper, which makes self-hosting Google fonts as simple as it possibly can be. The service worker of my website …

Weeknotes 17

I´ve created my first service worker and turned my website into a Progressive Web App 💪. After doing some precaching for static resources (JavaScript, CSS, …

Weeknotes 16

Emil draws “Ladybirds, fairy dust, and witches on witches broomsticks.” As of this week, Germany has 138,221 infected people and 4,098 people died on COVID-19. Four …

Weeknotes 15

Emil discovers the luxury of whitespace. Kristian Lumme describes the collaborative approach of Fournova, who are the makers of Tower for Git. Article “How We Work.” Stretchy …

Newspaper designs during the pandemic

Some remarkable newspaper designs I got aware of via Twitter. Michael Bierut pointed me towards the handwritten front page designs of the New York Times. A …

Website accessibility got worse

Dave Rupert made me aware with his tweet: The average website accessibility got worse during the last twelve months! This is according to the WebAIM annual accessibility …

Weeknotes 14

Emil draws “Snakes with Poison Dots.” Max Böck published a boilerplate Emergency Website Kit, which, especially these days, aims to provide a quick way to publish …

An RSS feed for GitHub Pages

RSS is a good thing. It simplifies to overview information that is produced by potentially many different sources. If someone has an RSS feed on …

maldekstra 7

A magazine by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung

Weeknotes 13

Write personal: “Into the Personal-Website-Verse” is a plea for personal websites from Matthias Ott. That gets a ★. “Advice from Ten Years of Leading Remote Teams” …

Weeknotes 12

Emil pictured the virus. I get the case counts from The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. At the end of this week we are counting 22.000 …

Weeknotes 11

This guy Jack McDade knows how to design a web page. Jack made Justin Jackson´s page, which I think is an exceptional piece of work. …

Weeknotes 10

Watched “Thereabouts 3: Discovering Colombia” again. It´s the best of the series. I can recommend this film for anyone who is into cycling. Restarted my sports …

Weeknotes 9

Signed assange-helfen. A state has been caught in a war crime and for that reason the state takes revenge on the person who helped to …

active-toc

Highlight your TOC entries while scrolling.

Compose CSS

A composable CSS Toolkit to build fast, maintainable, and responsive websites.

stacked-area

Draw SVG stacked area diagrams with a day-based x-axis.

cumulative-flow

Draw SVG cumulative flow diagrams and predict the anticipated completion of work.

horiz-gauge

Draw a SVG horizontal gauge.

somap

A sorted map and a sorted set, implemented as a binary tree.

Breakdown for Atom

Display and manipulate a breakdown structure of your JIRA Scrum project – even offline and only eventually connected to your JIRA system.

dheader

Make the header of your web pages dynamic.

Splitting User Stories

A User Story can cover vast amounts of functionality with a single sentence, which requires a team many weeks or even months of work to get it done (often called epic). Splitting such stories into pieces which are valuable for users and still deliverable within a Sprint is challenging for many teams. However, there are good reasons why you should do it.

The balanced organization

The agile manifesto defines a collaboration culture. But what if your current environment is not collaborative? This article describes alternatives to move into the agile direction.

Tracker

File your workout routines and get a nice graphical overview of your achievements and improvements.

Spitfire

A virtual whiteboard to be shared by multiple people at the same time. Users will be anonymous – so no one needs to sign in.

Supersize

Do not let scaled agile be your scaled snake oil

The agile worker

The agile worker exists because differences exist between theory and reality and because insights can be gained through these discrepancies.

The art in our work

The Agile Manifesto represents a force that is behind any particular agile procedure like XP, Scrum or Kanban. This force, the culture to challenge the status quo, attracts certain people and companies.

Scrum and Architecture

Cooperatively making architectural decisions, at a point in time when they are needed – and not earlier – is a quality-improving paradigm in agile software development. Conceptual integrity in the flow of architecture decisions will only be achieved if one person has the final word regarding those decisions. This is the architect, serving the product, whose rights and obligations in the context of the Scrum process are being reflected in this essay.

A Sprint is not a milestone

A Sprint is a sensor that allows us to see what has been done, what impediments are in our way and how we did better in comparison to previous Sprints.