I like photos and use them extensively on this site. But images have a price, as images can be quite large and every image needs to be fetched by a request. And so, image-heavy pages take quite some time to load. In the past weeks, I have introduced lazy-loading images on this weblog and would like to share how I did this. The examples are done in Hugo, a static site generator.

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Angular components are a powerful way to develop web applications. And there are so many helpful npm packages out there, which solve many of the intricate problems. But very often customers will not be happy with the standard solution out of the box. And so the question comes up how to gracefully extend existing 3rd party components.

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In one of my recent work projects, we are using charts within a Bootstrap grid. After updating from Chartist to ngx-charts, we had a severe issue with the charts, which suddenly overlapped each other. I would like to share my investigation and solution for this issue.

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In an attempt to explore new technologies, I have recently digged into GraphQL, which may be the future protocol for fetching data with mobile and web applications. In contrast to the current standard (REST APIs), GraphQL fetches exactly the data you need, in one request. This is vital for mobile applications and can also be handy for web applications.

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Currently, I am working on a hobby project, a theater production and actor database (mwtdb for short). It is visible on GitHub and open source. Requirements What I want to create is something similar to IMDb, which focuses on movies, TV and celebreties, but for amateur theater. A very basic version will contain actors, directors and technicians, contributing to productions. From a technical point of view, I will create a web application, using Angular and Neo4j, a graph database. Read more →

Soon, I will attend the Technical Summit 2016, which will take place from Dec 6 to 8 in Darmstadt. This is my first conference for my new employer (ConWeaver), where I am working pretty much along the same lines as for Comparis, meaning front-end development with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and its many derivatives (Sass, LESS, TypeScript). A new challenge is Angular, which has recently reached version 2 and comes with a nodejs-based workflow and with mostly alpha-staged tools around.

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In my current project, I had to deal with huge JSON files, which contain the order and properties of our layout elements. For CSS styling purposes, I had to move one particular array item to the end, create a new object and move all existing elements inside of that new object. This was tedious work when I did that manually. So I decided to develop a little C# Console application, taking care of that for me. Read more →

After my first week at ConWeaver, I got a first impression of the search framework and the technology used. The hot topic in the moment is Angular, which is a web application framework. In contrast to other server-side frameworks, the application logic is on the client (browser). This is a major trend now, aiming at Progressive Web Apps, which are as quick and responsive as native applications.

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I have started to read a new book, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome by Mary Beard. She takes quite a good approach and starts at 63 BC with Cicero accusing Catiline of conspiring against Rome (Second Catiline conspiracy), in one of the most popular political speeches.

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One pleasurable cinematic experience was the movie A Hologram for the King by Tom Tykwer. Tom Hanks stars as an ageing sales agent, who is sent to Saudi Arabia for a pitch of a virtual reality conference system. He finds himself with his fellow colleages in a tent in the desert, the king far away and probably never coming. I really enjoyed watching it and can recommend it. Read more →