Moin.
So, you stumbled upon this blog and are now wondering what the point is? I’m building a nerd wiki for myself and whoever else might find it interesting. I will cover a broad range of topics that are not really related to each other, but only by their target audience.
Eric
I collect hobbies, because my brain is weird. There is a new shiny thing every year.
I often think “there should be a better way of doing that” and then I obsess in finding that way, until I suddenly lose interest and do the next thing. I have an internal drive for efficiency and automation. That’s why I like to play Factorio and that’s why I learned building websites when I was 8 or so - back when you had to touch books to learn things - Google wasn’t a thing yet. I’ve spent most of my life doing things for, with and around the Web and the Internet.I absolutely love having access to that much knowledge. You can learn anything you want.
Someone needs to pay for those hobbies, so I work in Product Management at Flix, where I can apply my cynical drive for efficiency and obsession with web technology.
IT & Home-Automation
When we bought a house, the first thing we did was to put in a whole new electric installation. Everything is based on #KNX, to not rely on revenue streams of cloud providers that will decide tomorrow to stop supporting your lamp. I’ve been using Home Assistant for even longer, starting with Zigbee lamps. I automate stuff because I can, not because it makes sense.
Gardening
The house came with a nice sized piece of land - so I started digging, put in pipes and automated a few dozen valves to automate the irrigation. The amount of digging and debugging (heh) I did is probably more time than I would spend watering by hand, but we’re not here for the fun, as we Germans say. On the way I learned about PH levels, fertilizer and that palms are not trees and fungi are not plants.
AI
This post was written without AI or LLMs.
I still remember the existential terror one got from looking at DeepDream. The scale at which AI is accelerating is amazing, and I think it will be the next big thing. I don’t think collecting 3 trillion dollars for IPOs in 2026 is a good idea, and cooling datacenters with drinking water in the desert to generate cat-memes is an even worse idea, but I love how it tickles my brain. You can prototype anything. This could be the death of SaaS, because you can just generate hyper-niche applications - but obviously the current pricing model is not sustainable, investors want their 3 trillion dollars back. Let’s see where it goes.
Warhammer
Having weird hobbies like that got you bullied 30 years ago, but it seems Henry Cavill made it socially acceptable. I got like 2000 points of Dark Angels right now, and Necrons are waiting on the #pileofshame. So now you know where the blog title came from.
3D printing
Now my hyper-niche prototyping isn’t even limited to screens anymore - you can print whatever you want. Assuming it’s not bigger than 25cm cubed.
DIY
Sometimes I go and combine these hobbies. For example, I built a custom playtable to have Warhammer games at home. Let’s just hope my interest in this hobby lasts long enough to justify the time investment.
Thanks for reading my ramblings.