Some years ago I started yace (yet-another-cloudwatch-exporter) at my former employee InVision.de (ivx.com — Check them out!). Basically there was no prometheus exporter for AWS resources which could detect the resources based on tags, so I build it. My former company is using it for a big AWS environment since several years on production.

The project grew in adoption and collaboration so much in the last years. So many awesome people helped to develop it to its current state. …

While I am traveling bad things happened to me or others at the worst possible moments. The rental car tire blew up while driving to the airport to catch a flight. The police gave a speeding ticket when everything was already more expensive then thought. The airplane crew rejected entry of the plane because of an invalid date on a covid test. Freakout moments. The heart rate goes up and you think: Shit! Life seems to not be fair today to me.

I learned a trick I want to share with you to stay calm during situations like that. There…

I rated everything in life. A new job setting, a country I went to during vacation, the dinner in a restaurant or even a table a friend bought and put into their apartment. I stopped doing it some time ago and I observe. It makes me more happy.

Today is my fourth day on Fuerteventura. It is is the first time on this canary island. After arriving I immediately fell into my old behaviour of rating everything. It has more tourists, less spanish people. It is more crowdy, everything is expensive. Snorkeling on Tenerife was better. There is not much…

I am a pretty emotional person. I tend to make decisions based on my stomach feeling. In most cases that works pretty good. Still it is sometimes hard to really improve myself if I just do things without questioning them first.

Let me make a small example. In the past I had the feeling I should do more sport. I immediately packed my sports stuff and went running. Then I saw it makes me fun and I improved on it. Set new goals, continued and at some point I just stopped. Some years, months later I started again. Never knowing…

As I love to talk about my failures. Here are some of my last quarter. I tried to learn spanish stupidly. Was doing some retrospective lately about my laster quarter and realised some learnings I want to share.

Let me start with the thinking process. When I set my own goals I first take a lot of time thinking about the “WHY!” which basically is a big motivator for myself. The concept of really taking time to ask for the why is central in the goal setting of my company and I use it for my private stuff as well…

Just do it. Sometimes we have a habit and we break it as soon as we are getting out of our “perfect” mood. Today I try to keep my habit running even if it is hard. Had the feeling I am mentally totally exhausted for today and won’t be able to learn anymore language stuff. Instead of just skipping the learning, I just repeated every word and read the new ones I already wrote down some days earlier. Not trying to learn them. Just relaxed reading them, without stressing myself. Afterwards I found terms I like to learn for next…

Last twelve months were crazy. The relationship I thought will be the last, was not. My dad passed away. The pandemic hit. My uncle and his wife died in a horrific car crash. I moved to Lithuania from one day to another to help. Decided that I do not want to live in Düsseldorf anymore. Found new friends. Terminated my flat. Moved to Tenerife. While my small world collapsed and changed blazingly fast I did Kubernetes upgrades and learned new technologies, was maintaining open source repositories and preparing tech talks. Everything went on like life would be normal. My friends…