Posts
Homelab: Stacking Them High
I run my homelab on a bunch of used HP EliteDesk thin-clients stacked on top of each other. To keep things cool and relatively tidy I 3d printed a custom mini-rack and a bunch of smaller bits an pieces.
May 31, 2025
Mental models: Friction
No matter how careful and detailed the plans are, the projects still go over time, and budget. Is there one thing that makes both the construction works and software development hard to estimate? The answer comes from Carl von Clausewitz, a famous 19th-century Prussian general. But before we dive into military theory let’s consider an almost-too-real example of how things can go wrong in software development. A story of a “simple feature”Imagine a Product Manager in a mature B2B SaaS company. He sets out to solve a customer problem: currently, reports provided by the product make little sense to some of the customers. Customers from larger companies expect their data to be grouped and filtered using the divisions they are used to: teams, departments, regions, and such. Workarounds are costly and ineffective.
July 5, 2023
The missing parts of "DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity"
The new paper from the authors of DORA metrics got me excited and… worried. When misapplied, frameworks like this can, in fact, harm productivity. The paper itself does not mention the prerequisites for when the DevEx measurements are a good tool for the job. Let’s take a second to consider when and (more importantly) why measurements like these can be used. The paperThe authors of “DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity” propose 3 core dimensions of developer experience: feedback loops, cognitive load, and flow state. For each, they define 3 categories of metrics: perceptions, workflows, and KPIs. Each combination of dimensions and categories yields several DevEx-related metrics.
June 13, 2023
Planning, Strategy and Execution
Things like OKRs, big bets, wants, needs, must-haves, and other must-win battles often turn into an ever-changing soup of “stuff we have to do now”. Especially in tech, where the “plan, execute and learn” loop can be amazingly short, it’s too easy to get stuck in a quarterly groundhog day of constantly changing priorities. And with every change, a huge amount of time and effort is wasted. The reason is often the lack of an essential element, the strategy.
May 27, 2023
Designing small, USB-C bench power supply
Story of a relatively quick, hardware project. A ready-made module, box and couple of wires. Not much but it was fun to figure out and even kind of useful.
May 6, 2023
Quick intro to WaveForms scripting
During one of the electronic prototyping projects I found myself yearning for logic analyser, as one does sometimes. Debugging over a serial connection is all good but has it’s limitations. So I embarked on a quest for perfect logic analyser. Gathering tools is one of the greatest pleasures in life and can soon become a hobby itself. But when the (desk-)space is scarce one has to carefully consider every item. Today’s specimen is compact but also brings more to the table then one can expect. Although it comes at a price.
April 6, 2022
How bad is ATMega internal oscillator?
Atmega328 is a Arduino staple and all-time hobbist favourite. A little exploration of it’s limitations. How bad it can be anyway?
April 3, 2022