notes

Table of contents

2025-06-08: Shifting Priorities and Programming

It’s Pentecost, so Germany has a long weekend. Back when I didn’t have a family, these days would have been filled with working myself into things. And most importantly: I would have used the time to program something for myself, instead of writing code for a company.

But ever since having a wife and children things surprisingly changed. Of course priorities shift, and instead of learning all about, say “Graph Databases”, my free time is spent with family things. I am waiting for weeks to find some quiet hours to try ideas accumulated inside.

By now I do most of my writing and reading on a smartphone. The latest article on Google Zanzibar is no different, the code has been written in the Notes app on the phone. Auto-correct is the enemy!

Once I could hide inside my office, I boot a computer (thanks to modern hard drives it doesn’t take a lot of time!). I am copying the code, correct all the syntax errors and draft an article in parallel.

I wonder how other people handle it?

2025-06-07: How it all started... 22 years ago

This page started in 2003 as a way to share my poems with the world. It was a time full of beautiful self-pity, and not knowing what to do with my life… basically the whole range of first-world problems.

Please never use the Wayback Machine!

To the next 20 years to come!🍻

2025-06-07: The Microsoft Copilot Distortion Bubble

The Microsoft Build 2025 conference was all about AI and how it improves productivity. So it’s interesting to see Microsoft dogfooding Copilot in their dotnet/aspnetcore and dotnet/runtime repositories:

It’s hilarious to see these world class engineers begging their Copilot to “Please do not forget to add the files to the project!” and “Do not make up APIs!”. Yes, they label it an experiment, but I am sure it’s mandated use.

And why label it an experiment? The very same engineers just went on stage and told us, how it improves their workflow! Why am I not witnessing any use of Copilot in other PRs? What am I missing here?

Of course there’s a chance I am getting the whole thing wrong and Microsoft engineers believe in this? Or am I witnessing a cult? Whatever it is, outside the distortion bubble this whole thing looks pretty bad.

2025-06-07: Fulltext Search Engine using SQLite and FTS5 Tables

I've started a new job in 2024, so my free-time budget for writing blog articles took a cut.

One of the projects I didn't write about is a Full-Text Search Engine using SQLite FTS5 and Blazor WASM:

2025-06-07: Another "Google Zanzibar" Experiment with .NET

Relationship-based Access Control is an interesting approach to Authorization, with "Google Zanzibar" as an implementation described by Google. It's kind of a nemesis for me, because I have already tried to:

So of course I am now exploring it again and try to implement the Check API, Expand API and ListObjects API:

I don't know yet, if this is going to be successful or where it is going.

2025-06-07: Notes or "Lowering the Bar for Writing"

This "notes page" is an idea, to make it easier for me to write, without the tedious work of long-form blog articles. Maybe notes on this page are something akin to a small tweet.

At the moment this is a single page with technical and non-technical content being mixed wildly. I am not sure, if it’s a good idea. We will see.

However it lowers the bar for writing and publishing by a lot and I am sure I’ll find a way to turn this into a more coherent piece.

As of now, I really like this format! 🚀