tag:franz.hamburg,2020:writing Software, projects & software projects. Providing helpful technical posts and a broad collection of reading material. Franz Laage 2021-01-12T19:01:18.892626Z tag:franz.hamburg,2020-05-05:my-mail-driven-reading-list 2020-05-05T12:00:00Z

For my first blog post I want to talk about the reading list I built using AWS SES.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-05-06:syncing-redux-stores-across-browser-tabs 2020-05-06T12:00:00Z

I'm currently working on an web application which runs in two Chrome tabs/windows. The tabs have a leader-follower-relationship: So basically the leader tab is allowed to trigger state changes, where on the other hand the follower tab can only receive the changes and react to them e.g. displaying the changed data.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-05-09:the-moving-city---visualizing-public-transport 2020-05-09T12:00:00Z

This is a technical write-up on how https://hvv.live came to be, how the basic visualization is implemented and what nifty optimization we used to accomplish a satisfying user experience.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-05-10:analytics:-calculate-visits-from-page-views 2020-05-10T12:00:00Z

Disliking the current state of web analytics solutions, I've set up my own little thing.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-05-19:make-it-local 2020-05-19T12:00:00Z

So you have a service which does some data processing. It receives some input messages, maybe via HTTP, maybe from something like Kafka.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-06-28:shared-storage-for-lambda-functions 2020-06-28T12:00:00Z

A recent announcement from AWS sparked some joy: You are now able to mount an actual file system on lambda functions.

tag:franz.hamburg,2020-10-31:performance-improvements 2020-10-31T12:00:00Z

This post will describe a performance guide I presented to my team last week.

tag:franz.hamburg,2021-01-12:a-boring-website 2021-01-12T12:00:00Z

Programmers enjoy talking and reading about tech stacks. Here is mine

tag:franz.hamburg,2021-11-13:remote-monitoring-the-jvm 2021-11-13T12:00:00Z

Getting a close look into a running system can sometimes be pivotal for resolving an issue. There exists a class of problems only occurring on your production system. Logs and metrics go a long way surfacing those, but sometimes you have to go deeper.

tag:franz.hamburg,2022-01-13:cloudwatch-bill-adventure 2023-04-29T12:00:00Z

AWS bills are hard to dig through. My team stumbled upon another weird artefact we can't make sense of. For the first five days of a month we have twice the CloudWatch costs compared to the rest of the month.

tag:franz.hamburg,2022-03-01:clojure-first-impressions 2022-03-01T21:00:00Z

I'm currently sitting in on another team for a few months. This gives me the chance to take a look at a tech stack different from ours. Switching from Scala to Clojure as my primary programming language. One month in, I'm impressed with the productivity and simplicity of the language. With next to no previous exposure to Clojure I've got a good handle on things.

tag:franz.hamburg,2022-03-16:clojure-makes-happy 2022-03-16T21:00:00Z

I'm still sitting in on another team. After commenting on the very good mood of the team, someone said “Clojure makes happy”. I agreed, but it also got me thinking. How do other languages make me unhappy? How does this reflect on the team using a given language?

tag:franz.hamburg,2022-09-21:job-search 2022-09-21T12:00:00Z

I spent the first half of the year exploring the job market for new opportunities. (With success). Below I will share a few helpful resources.

tag:franz.hamburg,2022-10-05:fp-course 2022-10-05T20:00:00Z

At Otto two colleagues and me are teaching a course on functional programming. The course targets students and programming examples and exercises. This year we reworked all our materials to use Clojure instead.

tag:franz.hamburg,2023-01-23:atoms 2023-01-23T20:00:00Z my microblog thing I've got going on."]]> tag:franz.hamburg,2024-01-02:refactoring-boundaries 2024-01-02T12:00:00Z

I enjoy clarifying program boundaries through refactoring. Making sure the program has an “outside” and an “inside”. The outside handles the constraints imposed on the program. The format in which it receives its inputs and how it should produce its outputs. Does it get data via a web form? Does it write data in a specific Avro schema to a queue? These things matter, yet they shouldn’t pollute the business logic, the “inside”, of your program. They're in flux; today it’s JSON, tomorrow it’s protobuf. But your software, at its core, still solves the same problem. Working out a clear separation between this “outside” and your “inside” comes with plenty of advantages...

tag:franz.hamburg,2025-01-25:read-later-app 2025-01-25T12:00:00Z

A year ago, to this day, I started building a read it later app for my own. I’ve been actually using it almost daily in that period. This post will provide my motivations and some technical background.

tag:franz.hamburg,2025-12-07:kindling-dashboard 2025-12-07T12:00:00Z

Ever missed pulling the laundry out of the washing machine in time? We did that a lot. Finally, the itch was big enough to build a little helper.