Refactoring my banner into SVG was only the beginning: the next step was animation. I continued with the “AI as a teacher” model and asked Claude to explain to me concepts like IIFE, how the browser’s DOM processes SVG elements, which SVG properties are GPU-accelerated and other CSS performance conc…
If you’re a returning visitor, you might notice the header image on this blog looks more sharp and crisp—that’s because it is! ✨ After creating my own URL shortener, I wanted to modernize my header image. I built it back then in 2022 using p5.js, but the resolution wasn’t great. Now I wanted a more …
Yesterday, I re-implemented my custom URL shortener glez.me from scratch. I have a Claude Pro plan with Claude.ai, and just a week or so ago, they announced that it includes access to Claude Code as well, which is Anthropic’s agentic AI coding tool, so I decided to let Claude Code do it for me. I wa…
Back in the late 80s, I was a computer-enthusiastic teenager helping my mother, who was leading the German consulate in Rome at the time. I still remember teaching her secretaries how to use PCs for word processing instead of their trusty typewriters. I guess that was my very first gig as tech suppo…
About two weeks ago, Zed, my favourite code editor, introduced agentic coding, replacing its previous assistant panel on the right of its UI. A blog post walks through the way agents work in Zed now. The documentation now has an Agent Panel section. I’ve used it a bit for tweaking some stuff around …
In the last few articles, I shared a few thoughts on how I think the world of IT is changing, which became the context for my good-bye to the world of physical IT altogether.
As of last week, I started working for Amazon Web Services (AWS) as a Solutions Architect, helping customers architect systems and solve technical problems using the latest cloud computing technologies. I’m very thankful to be able to work here, as it brings me back to the very center of IT innovation and gives me the opportunity to do lots of new and interesting things.
In the last weeks, I’ve been digging around AWS and its services, playing with stuff and meeting lots of inspiring people. So I thought I’d put together a few links for those interested in exploring the world of the AWS cloud computing platform for you to learn more about AWS:
The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it. (Marcus Aurelius)
If you have a job in IT (and who among my readers hasn’t?), then it is going to fundamentally change soon.
Why?
In my own job, I see the full spectrum from where IT innovation is created to the very last laggards who are still depending a lot on mainframes and other ancient technology. Some things in IT are new (like, every week there’s a new startup/technology/trend that is shaking up the industry), and some things are just repetitions of stuff that has happened before, albeit in slightly different colors.
So now, the world of IT as we know it is changing (again) and this time, change will impact organizations, roles and jobs.
Let’s dive a little bit into what’s happening. Don’t worry, change is good, but only if you prepare for it.
While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle’s Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.
After all, isn’t this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?
On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there’s a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.
Why is that so? Could it be there’s more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let’s explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.
If I had to formulate in one sentence what my job and that of my teammates is, I’d say something like:
“To show our customers the business value of Oracle’s Engineered Systems”
Because at the end of the day, customers pay real money only if there’s some real value they see in a solution.
And that is the problem most people in IT struggle with: How is what you do in IT related to your company’s total value chain?
Most of the time, people, both those working in IT and those selling and supporting into IT departments are consumed with functions and features, tech specs, standards and other tech stuff. Worse yet: Some people look at Oracle’s Engineered Systems like Exadata and Exalogic and they only see a bunch of servers in a rack, because all they know is components, servers, tech stuff.
This is dangerous terrain: Because if you can’t show the business value of your IT to your company, you’re going to be put on the list of cost centers to be squeezed, and budget cuts are never a good motivator for your job.
So what is the value of IT to the business? Or more specifically, what is the value of Engineered Systems for our customers’ businesses?
After having gone through TOGAF training and certification, I’ve now caught the Enterprise Architecture bug, as you can probably tell by this article. It is a really neat way to add structure to the IT development process and to better understand what it really means to solve business problems with IT.
One of the first things TOGAF recommends architects do when establishing an Enterprise Architecture practice within a company is to formulate Architecture Principles that guide the development of solutions. During the last few workshops and during some discussions with other architects, three principles in particular struck me as being key to successfully developing a Cloud solution:
Recently, I attended a customer workshop where the customer declared that they standardized on x86, VMware and Linux.
That got me and my colleague thinking about what standardization really means and whether that actually makes sense.
The workshop was actually about defining a PaaS platform for the customer, and early in the process they just said: Fine, but it’s gonna be x86, VMware and Linux, because that’s our standard. WTF?
Don’t worry, this is not a desperate attempt at SEO for my blog (although I do appreciate your likes, Tweets, RSS subscriptions and other ways you help me reach a wider audience), nor is this my entry into the latest contest of IT BS Bingo.
It just occurred to me yesterday that Big Data is everywhere. Even during your weekend jogging run.
One of the first things that customers and sales teams realize when dealing with Engineered Systems is: They fundamentally change the IT architecture of a business.
Change is good, it means progress. But change is sometimes seen as a bad thing: Change comes with fear.
The truth is that Engineered Systems really empower IT architects to add value to their business, application and data architectures, without worrying about the technology architecture.
To understand this, we need to dig a bit deeper into Enterprise Architecture, specifically the TOGAF flavor of it.
I changed into a new role at Oracle: I now work for the EMEA Engineered Systems Architecture Team (ESAT). We support Oracle’s EMEA Engineered Systems business by engaging with customers, enabling our field organization with trainings and through evangelization.
You can call me biased towards Engineered Systems (no link, page no longer exists) now, but that would be like accusing a Mac fanboy of suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome, when it’s actually the other way round.
The other side of the “biased” medal really is that I have a choice of where I want to work, and one of the reasons I changed from my cozy SPARC/Solaris Technology camp to the Engineered Systems crowd is: I believe the world of IT is changing.
Let me explain.
First of all: Apologies for not posting for a long time. The reason? I was having too much fun with node.js and the Joyent Cloud :).
What started as a small experimental hack turned quickly into an exciting new pet project involving the good old Mandelbrot Set, as a web service, running in the Joyent cloud, programmed in node.js.
But first things first: Let’s take a look at node.js as a language and programming model, at the Joyent Cloud and how it relates to Solaris and finally some details on how the picture you see was rendered inside the Joyent Cloud, including an interactive Mandelbrot Set explorer you can play with now, written as a web app.
Last week during WorldHostingDays, I had the opportunity to visit Tom (@tomme), a former colleague of mine who came with Q-Layer to Sun, then to Oracle. Today, he works for a new Belgian startup called Amplidata (no link, amplidata.com no longer exists), a company that specializes in building storage clouds. He introduced me to Wim, their CEO and we discussed their optimized object storage technology, some parallels to ZFS and the newest trends in cloud computing storage. Amplidata is a spin-off of Incubaid, a technology incubator which is responsible for the success of two good old Sun friends: Innotek (VirtualBox) and Q-Layer (The company that powered the Sun Cloud).
A while ago, we tried defining ebooks, and figure out what they are, and what they aren’t. Now, let’s have a look at some success factors, or barriers, business implications and the (un)necessity of DRM.
2010 is going to be the year of the ebook. If it wasn’t obvious before, it became so overnight after Apple entered the ebook reader and distribution market big time.
I’ve been eying ebook and ebook reader developments for some time and decided to become an ebook early adopter: Over the holidays, I bought myself a Sony PRS-600 Ebook Reader (no link, page no longer exists). In this new blogging category, I’ll explore a few aspects of ebooks, formats and the ecosystem while trying to figure out what’s in it for you and me and the geeks in us.
Before we dive into ebook-land, it’s probably useful to figure out what the point of ebooks is in the first place, what we want from them and what we should expect of them. This is useful because today’s consumers, vendors, and the whole industry seem to be distracted by features, hype and old habits, sometimes missing the point.