Jochen Lillich

We got a feature request that would be a great improvement to our product but most likely break someone’s workflows. I wrote down how we rolled out the change without triggering a flood of angry emails. monospacementor.com/2023/10/un-b...

Team efficiency can suffer from all kinds of friction. In "Don’t push harder. Reduce friction.", I describe the problems and possible solutions. Be the Zamboni that enables your team to skate gracefully! ➜ monospacementor.com/2024/04/team... #TeamWork #CompanyCulture #Leadership

Distributed companies can learn a lot from Open Source projects. In fact, some of the most successful distributed companies are deeply rooted in the FLOSS community. monospacementor.com/2024/06/remo...

"Tests provide the only reliable documentation of design. The story they tell remains true long after paper documents become obsolete and human memory fails. Write your tests as if you expect your future self to have amnesia." (Sandi Metz, "Practical Object-Oriented Design")

⭐️ Interesting project: github.com/vampyren/obs... Unofficial Linux control app for OBSBOT cameras

New General post in The Server Room: "Improvements to my wiki" community.monospacementor.com/t/444

⭐️ Interesting project: github.com/tomekw/doom-... Doom Emacs Ada language module with syntax highlighting, LSP and Alire support

⭐️ Interesting project: github.com/apollo1220/b...

📖 Interesting read: "Power grab" tante.cc/2026/09/11/p... #linux #community #opensourcesoftware

📖 Interesting read: "Look at all the things he's not doing" andycroll.com/ruby/look-at... #ruby #rails

📖 Interesting read: "Thirteen Criteria for Evaluating a Programming Language" severinbucher.com/posts/thirte... #softwareengineering

⭐️ Interesting project: github.com/We-Manage/we... Ansible Role for installing seaweedfs from source

In my conversations with junior engineers, the issue of work hours comes up often. There's a lot of bad advice out there, for example "You need to work 80-hour weeks to get good." I wrote an article on why that's silly. ➜ monospacementor.com/2024/04/work...

"Whenever you put in a feature before you really need it, you are guilty of programming while stupid; if you wait until you really need the thing, you are likely to have a better understanding of what you need to do and how you should go about doing it." (Russ Olsen, Design Patterns in Ruby)

"Well-designed code is easy to change, refactoring is how you change from one design to the next, and tests free you to refactor with impunity." (Sandi Metz, "Practical Object-Oriented Design")

📖 Interesting read: "Work is water" stevefenton.co.uk/blog/2026/10... #mentalhealth #productivity

New System Administration post in The Server Room: "From a Docker command to a systemd service" community.monospacementor.com/t/442

New blog post: "The README says Docker. I write Quadlets." ➜ monospacementor.com/knowhow/dock... #knowhow

If you are eager to learn effectively, you’ll have to accept that learning isn’t a spectator sport. It’s a contact sport. To boost your know-how, and with it your career, find a group that helps you reach your goals. monospacementor.com/2024/05/lear...

If you're looking for an ebook reader application that works across an amazing range of devices and systems, has integrations with Calibre and Readwise, and is free software, check out KOReader. I'm blown away by its features. github.com/koreader/kor...

"Well-designed applications are constructed of reusable code. Small, trustworthy self-contained objects with minimal context, clear interfaces, and injected dependencies are inherently reusable." (Sandi Metz, "Practical Object-Oriented Design") #Ruby #Programming #SoftwareEngineering

New System Administration post in The Server Room: "WiFi VLANs" community.monospacementor.com/t/441

New General post in The Server Room: "Busting moves in the data centre!" community.monospacementor.com/t/412

Zulip is underrated as a chat platform. Its automatic threading makes it so much easier to catch up on previous conversations than it is on Slack, Teams or Discord. Zulip is ideal for asynchronous communication in a distributed team, and 100% #OpenSource! Check it out: zulip.com

On most of my machines, I use the Niri window manager. What I like about it more than any other tiling WM is that you’re not limited to physical screen size. Since Niri scrolls horizontally, I can have dedicated workspaces that never run out of space.

"Tech debt manifests as engineering projects that take longer to ship than expected and quality being a problem. […] But the root problem is that the system has grown too complex and haphazard to be manageable." (Chuck Groom, The Tech Debt Playbook)

When you live in the terminal as I do, a multiplexer like `tmux` is invaluable. It's basically a session and window manager for the shell. Here's my current tmux configuration to give you a head start: gitlab.com/geewiz/dotfi...

"When messages are trusting and ask for what the sender wants instead of telling the receiver how to behave, objects naturally evolve public interfaces that are flexible and reusable in novel and unexpected ways." (Sandi Metz, "Practical Object-Oriented Design")

If you follow my live coding streams, you know that I use neovim as my editor. It does everything I need for system administration, coding and writing. Get a head start and use my configuration: gitlab.com/geewiz/dotfi...

Making the most of our work time is important both for our career and our own job satisfaction. But sometimes, we’re losing sight of the bigger picture over productivity methods and metrics. monospacementor.com/2024/05/purp...

"The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you." (Austin Kleon, Show Your Work!) This is why I run a DevOps/SRE community. ➜ monospacementor.com/devops-learn...

🚨LIVE NOW!🚨 Cozy DevOps chat | Linux, DevOps, SRE - Let's talk about it! Thursday stream in Just Chatting https://twitch.tv/MonospaceMentor

"The key to managing dependencies is to control their direction. The road to maintenance nirvana is paved with classes that depend on things that change less often than they do." (Sandi Metz) #Ruby #Programming #SoftwareEngineering

🚨LIVE NOW!🚨 DevOps coworking -- Let's engineer things together! | !todo !done !tasks Friday stream in Co-working & Studying https://twitch.tv/MonospaceMentor

New blog post: "Coders have to grow" ➜ monospacementor.com/knowhow/code... #knowhow

🚨LIVE NOW!🚨 Linux, DevOps, SRE - Let's talk about it! | Send me your questions with !q Thursday stream in Just Chatting https://twitch.tv/MonospaceMentor

If you're looking for a more modern alternative to the `du` command that shows you what's taking up your disk space, try `dust`. It returns a graphical overview with percentages, and uses colours to highlight the largest subdirectories. github.com/bootandy/dust

I love the atomic Fedora distributions for their ability to rebase customizations onto a new OS release. Here’s another great benefit: being able to easily pinpoint the release when a regression crept in. enblog.eischmann.cz/2024/02/15/b...

"Using positional arguments requires less code today, but you pay for this decrease in volume of code with an increase in the risk that changes will cascade into dependents later." (Sandi Metz) #Ruby #Programming #SoftwareEngineering

Are you just starting your engineering career? And you feel like you don’t belong? Be kind to yourself. It’s probably not Impostor Syndrome. monospacementor.com/2024/05/its-...

There's something about Rust that inspires developers to build modern replacements for traditional Unix/Linux commands. One example is `bat`, a "cat clone with wings". monospacementor.com/2022/01/fsl-...

"How many times have you seen a comment that is out of date? Because comments are not executable, they are merely a form of decaying documentation. If a bit of code inside a method needs a comment, extract that bit into a separate method." (Sandi Metz)

Tip for Linux shell beginners: Execute a second command only if the first one failed. `command_1 || command 2` Background: This compound command uses the result code returned by `command_1` with the "shortcircuit" behaviour of the "logical OR" `||` operator. #Linux #Shell #Terminal

One of the features for which I love Ruby is that it has syntax features that let me express clearly what the intention of my code is. - `unless` instead of `if not` - `until` instead of `while not` - `loop do` instead of `while true` #Ruby #Coding

The concept of Test-Driven Development isn’t particularly new any more. But even after quite a few years of accompanying my code with tests, TDD is still far from being second nature to me. A talk from RubyHACK 2018 motivated me to get better at it. monospacementor.com/2023/08/test...

A government that will do absolutely anything in order to avoid having to do something.

Almost every Linux CLI tool that requires you to edit a file will consult the `EDITOR` environment variable to spawn the editor you prefer. If you want to use `nano` instead of `vim`, set it as your default editor like this: `export EDITOR=nano`

If you want to raise your shell scripts to a new level, give this a try! It'll give useful feedback on the style of your shell code and on possible issues with it. www.shellcheck.net PS: Know when to switch to a proper programming language. #Linux #SysAdmin #SystemAdministration

In many of my projects, I need to run sets of commands both on my workstation during development, and later in a CI/CD pipeline to ship my changes. The solution: Taskfile is a modern take on the classic Makefile, but more capable and less fiddly. taskfile.dev

As someone who is less than 2 weeks from taking the oath of fidelity to the Irish nation and to 'respect its democratic values', I find this news incredibly disheartening. It is bad policy in search of a problem and a pathetic sop to a racist minority who do not embody the ideals of the nation.