• UX Extravaganza - Electricity Meter Reading

  The dreaded email arrived: it’s time for the annual electricity meter reading. I immediately noticed it wasn’t from the usual company this time, but it didn’t look like phishing. In fact, it explicitly stated it was trustworthy and definitely not a scam, right in the email.

• Junior vs. Senior Skillsets: The Case for Hiring Juniors, Even in a Bad Market

  A recent conversation with a colleague sparked an interesting thought about how we evaluate developers at different stages of their careers. It went something like this:

• Grok 4: I Wanted to Believe

  With legions of impatient X users standing guard, the release of xAI’s Grok 4 has finally happened. But man, the amount of shills enthusiastic, real life users reposting the same 10-15 use cases was off the charts. Coincidentally, this set of scenarios was full of self-contained, straightforward, close-ended problems. I desperately miss a demonstration of this PhD-level LLM, working on (or even better: solving) a real life problem that has no “correct” solution.

• Unlocking Ubuntu LUKS2 encryption automatically at boot

  Tired of asking for a KVM every time you need to reboot your server to unlock your LUKS2 encryption?

• Install an OS without KVM

  I wanted to install RHEL on a Hetzner bare metal server, but there was a large demand for KVMs and I didn’t want to wait. I’ve found a tutorial on how to install Proxmox from the Hetzner rescue system - here’s how to do it for (almost) any OS.

• Install RSAT via Powershell

  Note to self – I needed to install RSAT on a build agent, so using the “optional features” GUI was not possible.

• Azure DevOps - build pipeline billing extravaganza

  Azure DevOps has a nice little feature called Azure Pipelines. It’s a great CI/CD tool, especially if you’re already using Azure DevOps for your source control and work item tracking. However, it’s pricing is a little confusing, and it’s easy to end up paying more than you need to.

• Global and persistent query filters for Entity Framework Core

  Occasionally, you may want to apply a filter to all queries for an entity type. For example, you may want to ensure that some records are not returned in any query, such as when an entity is soft-deleted.

• Let's Encrypt Certbot manual mode with Azure Key Vault

  Most of the time, I use Certbot to generate and renew my Let’s Encrypt certificates in an automatic way, i.e. through Github Actions or something. However, every now and then I need to generate a certificate manually, usually for ephemeral purposes.

• Persist a list of integers with Entity Framework Core

  I had to persist a list (or array) of integers in a database table using Entity Framework Core. I was surprised to find that EF Core does not support this out of the box. I found a few solutions online, but they all seemed to be overly complicated, here’s a quick summary of what I’ve found.