3 items are tagged with meta:

I recently got asked how a Java programmer by day comes around to work with embedded MCUs by night. We Java developers are famous to think more in giga bytes, which is somewhat counterproductive in the embedded world.

Actually the reason is simple - I started my electronics career before I became a software developer. Back then East Germany was still alive, and electronics was an expensive hobby. So I stayed with quite small projects, more in the sense of small experiments. After the wall came down, it was easier to start real projects - but being in school limits the financial abilities a little bit. And electronics, back then,still meant only small scale stuff for someone starting in the field.

There was some silence here for the last couple of weeks. The reason was that I migrated my infrastructure from Thingamablog to nanoc. I was always fond of desktop CMSs, since I prefer not to have run dynamic code on my server for stuff that doesn’t change. That’s why I originally choose Thingamablog - it was lightweight and easy to use and worked fine all the time.

But since I re-started with my blog, I noticed two problems:

• the spell checker sometimes just hangs, which requires killing the program (and losing all changes)
• the data is stored in a database, meaning I cannot store it under version control (one could, but you don’t get diffs and merges and all the important stuff)

So I was busy with setting up nanoc (on Linux and Windows, since I use one at home and the other one at work) and building a blog infrastructure based on it. Fortunately, there are many resources available, starting with the nanoc homepage. I got most of my utility code from h3rald’s pages and from nanoc3_blog starter kit.

Most of the work after that went into migrating all articles (manually changing them to markdown syntax) and into converting the existing template and CSS code.

So here we go, everything looking as before (I hope :).

Oh my, I just realized that the last post here is more than 4 years old. What was intended just as a short break now results in a complete restart. Many thing have happened in the past - my son is now over 3 years old, my company is near the 3rd software release since then (and the biggest in its history), we rebuild our house, and I found a new hobby.

Two and a half year ago my company got sucked into one of its greatest journeys of its history, resulting in the product release mentioned above. And I got sucked into this right from the beginning. Unfortunately, this means days and weeks and months of just shuffling spreadsheets and refining documents. After several months of this I got so dull that I decided to do something more challenging. And when I stumbled across some of my old electronics projects, I decided to revive my old hobby which I put to sleep about 15 years ago (somewhere in the middle of my studying).

So there will be a mixture of topics in the future - some about software development and architecture, some about my electronics projects and what I learned there.