Recently, Nicolas Fränkel published an article highlighting the advantages of XML as a configuration language for server-side (Java) software. Being an XML-veteran like Nicolas I totally understand all of his arguments. However, there is one argument missing which is IMHO the strongest argument why XML is avoided (especially) in cloud software scenarios. One of the big advantages of XML, the possiblity to express a schema for your XML format is at the same time the biggest weakness. …

Recently I changed my job from synyx Karlsruhe back to the good old SAP headquarters in Walldorf. Since I slowly ramped down my active project work I had the time to write a longer blog post which was then hosted at the Cockroach Labs site. So, if you’re interested in building a application on top of a cloud-native datastore without losing the qualities of a traditional, acid-compliant RDBMs this article is for you. …

This behavior has been fixed in the latest version of Ubuntu 20.04. The described fix is not needed anymore. After a short affair with Fedora 31 I recently switched to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Since I cannot stand the purple color and the overall look and feel of the Ubuntu Gnome Theme I switched to the Vanilla Gnome desktop shortly after install: sudo apt install vanilla-gnome-desktop I use Gnome Software to install my applications. …

After a few months with my own NES classic theme I switched to a theme that offers a more readable font for longer texts. Reason is that I actually wrote my first post on this blog and it was awful to read it in this 8-bit style NES font. BTW: the color scheme is solarzied light. I really love that color scheme. It runs on my terminal, my IDEs and everywhere else where it makes sense. …

Those days I ran into the same trap the second time. So I decided to have a short writeup for future me and other Go beginners. The trap was that I wrote nice structs like { "key1": "value1", "key2": "value2" } And wanted them to be unmarshalled them into structs like this: type foo struct { key1 string key2 string } Doing this regularly with Jackson in Java I named the attributes like the keys in the JSON file. …