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Skip to Content Alexander Schwartz Developer, Coach, Speaker Visit my homepage at https://www.ahus1.de Home Contact Talks Projects Publications Links Posts on Software Development and IT Operations Recording Audio and Video on Linux 2022-03-26 @ Home Recently I switched my work computer from Windows to Linux (Fedora 35), and I needed to re-learn all things about video and audio configurations. This describes how I configure webcam, OBS and virtual audio devices. Please bookmark this and re-visit it now as I’ll update it when I learn something new. (7 minutes read) Continue reading... Interactive AsciiDoc Training using Bowmann’s 4Cs 2021-09-20 I regularly give presentations, now and then also trainings. To engage more with participants, I wanted to make them more interactive. The book “Training from the back of the room” was on my reading list for quite some time to help me with this. Now that I’ve read it, this post summarizes my first two trainings that I structured using this approach. It was all about Bowman’s 4Cs: Connections, Concepts, Concrete Practice and Conclusions. (10 minutes read) Continue reading... Ready for DevOps? Take the shoelace challenge! 2021-06-19 Are you ready for DevOps? Take the shoelace challenge, and find about your capabilities to observe and measure,try out new things, andchange your own way of working! (6 minutes read + 10 minutes practicing) Continue reading... Voice recording in studio quality on Windows? 2021-04-30 @ Home Over the previous months I worked to improve my voice quality in video calls and for recordings. This included both hardware to record (a RØDE VideoMic NTG) and software filter out noise (VoiceMeeter, Cantabile, Reaper plugins). This post summarizes what I’ve done. Please read about the choices I made and the difficulties I faced. I’m happy to hear how this can be improved. (8 minutes read) Continue reading... Feedback on documentation 2021-02-24 @ Continuous Documentation Regulars After preparing and publishing documentation, how do you get feedback? Do people actually read the docs you publish? Without feedback you will not understand if you’ve written the right content for the right people in the right way. This blog post summarizes ideas and experiences shared at the Continuous Documentation Regulars. Read on for a comparison together with pro’s and con’s. (12 minutes read) Continue reading... Documentation site for users with AsciiDoc and Antora 2021-02-07 @ FOSDEM The tool Antora creates documentation websites from AsciiDoc sources stored in Git repositories. Users can browse the generated website and select the version matching the software they use. As part of the Tool the Docs Devroom at FOSDEM I presented the basics of an Antora setup. I walked through all the steps from editing content in the IDE to updating the documentation site using continuous integration and delivery. Continue reading... Diagrams in Documentation 2020-10-28 @ Continuous Documentation Regulars When authoring technical documents, we often struggle to find the easiest way to include diagrams. This article lists several diagramming tools and several ways you can use them to enhance the documentation for your users and to improve your authoring workflow. Read on to find out more about the features and surprises diagrams.net and other tools had in store for us at this meeting of the Continuous Documentation Regulars. (8 minutes read) Continue reading... AsciiDoc content in a Single Page Web App 2020-10-23 How to get the content on a website? Separating it from the technical stuff sounds like a good practice for distraction free writing and focused coding. Can an import statement do the trick to load the content from a markup file? This blog post explores how content written in the markup language AsciiDoc can be used in a single page web application. It shows a minimal generic setup without using existing content plugins. The examples are based on webpack, NuxtJS and Vue.js. You can adapt the recipes in any project that uses webpack. (10 minutes read) Continue reading... Live coding a docs site with Antora and AsciiDoc 2020-07-22 @ Continuous Documentation Regulars In one of our previous meetups of the Continuous Documentation Regulars some participants asked to hear more about Antora, “the documentation site generator for tech writers who ? writing in AsciiDoc”. So this is what we did. Continue reading... Continuous Documentation Camp (rebooting) Continuous Integration and Delivery is commonplace for software. Let’s benefit from the same principles and apply them to documentation as well: Keep it up to date, run automated tests, collaborate as teams, roll it to production seamlessly. I planned for an un-conference, but planning was difficult due to the COVID-19 virus. The number of registered participants was too small. The camp is rebooting to find a new concept to attract more participants and to avoid an impact of the virus. Continue reading... Stopping Entropy with ArchUnit 2019-10-16 So your team has agreed on naming conventions for classes and how to structure classes in packages. Last week you found out that a specific class is error prone to use. Writing this down in a Wiki will not allow for automatic checks. Tools that produce dashboards look nice at first sight, but will fall into oblivion soon. My talk at Devoxx UK and BaselOne shows how to automate architecture rules and best practices as ArchUnit tests. It will compare ArchUnit with other tools to show limits and advantages of this approach. Continue reading... Asciidoctor Deep Dive 2019-09-11 AsciiDoc is a markup language for documentation. Asciidoctor is a popular implementation of a rendering engine for AsciiDoc. Today I’m giving the talk at the JavaZone conference in Oslo. I post the code samples, the slides and a video recording of a previous talk at JavaLand here. In the talk I share my experiences with Asciidoctor, tips and tricks and hints to style your PlantUML diagrams. I also show how to get most out of Asciidoctor PDF generation using templates and extensions. Continue reading... Monitoring with Micrometer 2019-07-21 Finally I’ve managed to publish the recording of my Micrometer talk at the JavaLand conference from March this year. You can hear the talk next in Berlin (DE) in September and in Basel (CH) in October! Read on to find slides, video (35 min) and upcoming talks on this topic. Continue reading... Making the “Switch” for documentation 2019-07-04 How are you handling documentation in your software project? Who is writing it, and is it up-to-date? After reading the book “Switch – how to change things when change is hard” (by Chip and Dan Heath) I followed their advice and collect previous experience and new ideas how to make documentation work. (15 minutes read) Continue reading... Nuxt.js: Performance, Search Engines and Social Media 2019-06-27 I’ll present Nuxt.js at enterJS darmstadt today. I’ll focus loading performance, search engine optimisation and making the site work when sharing content on social media. Read on to find the slide set. Continue reading... “Writers Write” at Devoxx UK 2019 2019-05-27 Devoxx United Kingdom 2019 hosted a documentation birds-of-a-feature (BOF) session: Dan Allen lead this session called “Writers Write!”, with Ixchel Riuz and Alexander Schwartz (me) being co-leads. This is a write-up of the discussions and experiences we shared as a group. It takes a look at tools, challenges and trends in documentation. (10 minutes read) Continue reading... Prometheus and Grafana Talks 2019-05-15 Today I’ll present my Prometheus 101 - getting started talk at Continuous Lifecycle London. Read on to find the slides of the talk. Or do you want to book an event or private workshop near you? Continue reading... Vue.js Aync Components with Loading Indicator 2018-05-06 At the Vue.js Frankfurt Meetup I’ve presented the benefits and caveats of asynchronous Vue.js components. For now, there are only some slides. I plan to extend it to a proper blog post soon. Continue reading... DevOps: Fast, reliable and safe delivery 2019-04-30 At the beginning of the century Nicolas Carr claimed that “IT doesn’t matter”. But today software delivers the services and products we consume, and every improvement requires changes to the software. Companies strive to test their new ideas faster and more reliable than their competitors. To do this, a company needs to re-invent its organisation, technology and culture for DevOps. In our article in Informatik Spektrum Björn and me summarize who needs DevOps, how it works. We also detail the challenges and benefits. (15 minutes read) Continue reading... Book Review: Made to Stick 2019-02-20 When you write, write for your readers, they say. But will your readers remember it? Will they even read the article to its end? Chip Heath and Dan Heath answer the question why some ideas survive and others die, i. e. why they are being remembered or forgotten. (5 minutes read) Continue reading... Hosting simplified by a CDN 2019-02-02 Last year I moved my personal website and our Meetup’s homepage to Netlify, a content delivery network (CDN). I was astounded about the minimal steps necessary make it work. It simplified both the setup and the day-to-day operations for me. This article takes you through the minimal, yet real world steps to set up the homepage of the Vue.js Frankfurt Meetup with Netlify. (15 minutes read) Continue reading... Nuxt: Making your website fast 2019-01-02 You are looking for short loading times and high interactivity for your website? Nuxt got you covered: A JavaScript framework that serves a pre-rendered page for a fast first meaningful paint and then transforms the page into a full interactive single page This post shows how to make Nuxt even faster with the webpack plugins imagemin, responsive-loader and postcss to minify images and CSS. (10 minutes read) Continue reading... Book Review: Knigge for Software Architects 2018-12-23 Some DOs and DON’Ts for software architects. Peter Hruschka and Gernot Starke provide some insights about an IT architects’s role. Beware: when reading this book, you’ll be tempted to read more of the referenced literature. Continue reading... Vue.js: Articles, Videos and Trainings 2018-12-13 Articles, Slides, recorded talks. Lots of material to get you started with Vue.js. I’m also co-organizing Vue.js Frankfurt: If you are nearby, join one of our meetups! Continue reading... Book Review: The Tangled Web 2018-11-21 A good friend and colleague lent me this book. Although the title “The Tangled Web” gave a different idea, the subtitle “A Guide to Securing Modern Web Applications” pointed to its security background. It turned out to be a dive into the history and workarounds of the web! Continue reading... Observability for Microservices 2018-11-04 To be able to identify and analyse problems, applications in a microservice environment need to provide standardized information to enable efficient operations. This talk presents four areas that are part of observability: status information, logs, metrics, and traces. Continue reading... Book Review: Java by Comparison 2018-07-18 The full title reads “Java by Comparison - Become a Java Craftsman in 70 Examples”. When I first heard of the book I was sceptical: Is there really enough common ground for 70 good code examples? Would the examples be the starting point of an argument if you would show them to a team of programmers? After a conference in Berlin, Simon offered me a free copy to read. Continue reading... Dotfiles for crossplatform projects 2018-04-06 Whenever I start a new project, I like to check in configurations to Git, so that every other developer uses the same settings as I did. This also leads to more reproducible build. This post summarizes the different files and their interdependencies. Continue reading... Logging and Tracing with Zipkin and Spring Sleuth 2018-03-22 I finally added a recording at Voxxed Days Cluj! There is now a recording in English and German. The cycle is now complete. There is a lot of material to read, watch and try-out! Continue reading... Microservices - more than a hype? 2017-10-29 For the German magazine Informatik Spektrum I wrote an article capturing the current ideas of microservices as an introduction. It’s based on my project experience over the last two years. A free online-version of the article is available as well! Continue reading... RSS Feed This is Alexander Schwartz' personal website. The source code is licensed MIT. The website content is licensed CC BY NC SA 4.0 unless stated otherwise. Contact - Impressum - Privacy Policy - Accessibility - Licenses