Archive of 2026 | Daniel Markow

August 2026

Keyboard Phones are…

A couple of days ago I started an experiment. After years on the iPhone I switched to a Unihertz Titan 2 Elite. Not my first Android phone but my first phone with a physical keyboard and a smaller BlackBerry-ish kind of screen. I never owned a Blackberry so this is not about nostalgia. It is about using a device made for generating text and thus communicating efficiently. Most modern phones are made for creating and consuming video and sound content. The typing experience has actually gotten worse. To me that's not efficient. I especially loathe voice messages on WhatsApp. It is inconvenient for me to type so I put the inconvenience of listening to me rambling on you the recipient of my message. When you forget a part of my message have fun searching for it in a 10 minute voice recording. Thus when I saw the prototypes on YouTube I was immediately intrigued and decided to back their kickstarter. I got my Titan 2 Elite in the mail last week for the very reasonable price of 380€. The…

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May 2026

PHP is actually…

I am maintaining several Next.js applications at the moment. The number of dependencies and the vulnerabilities they bring are astonishing. For a while, I have been searching for something simpler—I don't really use Next.js's features for what I do anyway. Usually, the start page is static, and the remaining pages are client components. Or, everything is static. I tried numerous frameworks and languages. For example, Elixir and the Phoenix framework as well as .NET 10. While they were okay, none of them worked well for me. You know that feeling? Sometimes you find a tool that just clicks with your brain, and working with it becomes a much more intuitive endeavor. None of them were that. Until I started building with PHP. Not Laravel or Symfony (which are fine), but classic PHP applications where the majority of the PHP code lives in the markup. To me, PHP is like the C of the web development world. It forces you to think about HTTP again. There are no heavy abstractions, nothing to…

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Max Beckmann…

Trost ist der sichere Glaube an die Unrealität des Lebens hinter der vielleicht die wirkliche Wahrheit liegt. Und um sie zu finden, das heißt leben und sterben. Immer wieder aufs neue leben und sterben bis wir da angelangt sind, wo es keine Erfahrung mehr gibt nur noch absolutes Wissen. Je intensiver man zu sich selber kommt umso eher kommt man ihm oder dem Absoluten näher. Das ist das Ziel und der Trost.

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Analyse CloudWatch…

I have about 8 years of AWS under my belt. I still really don't like CloudWatch. The fact that someone at AWS thought it is a good idea to design a custom query language for logs is astonishing to me. And I know you can use SQL now or let AI generate the query for you - still it's not great. The UI is horrible. You get stuck with it however especially if budget is tight and custom solutions are out of the question. Or maybe you are using another AWS service like ECS Fargate to host your application. CloudWatch is deeply embedded in the AWS ecosystem. I do like DuckDB, though. It is a very capable file-based analytics database which just wants to plow through gigabytes of JSON logs on your laptop. Thus, I decided to make use of some of my free time and write my own command line tool cw-to-duck that exports CloudWatch logs directly into a DuckDB file. All you need to do is install AWS CLI, log in to your account with a role that has sufficient permissions to access your logs and run…

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Permanent link to “Don't be an idiot...”

April 2026

SEO for lazy people

Although I have been dabbling in web development for a while I have never gotten into SEO. I guess I am more of a developer than I am an entrepreneur because once the technical challenge is solved, I tend to lose interest. If you want to earn money however people need to know about your solution in addition to it being useful, fairly priced and excel in many other aspects. It is part of the game. In our new venture we are performing employee surveys in local government organisations and other state institutions in Middle-Germany. Although this kind of work is usually offered through public tenders it is still helpful to be found by decision makers. The first thing you need is a web page. Since I am not much of a UX designer and have a Gemini subscription I decided to use Google Stitch project which is basically an AI driven Figma. The designs it generates still have that undesirable ai-generated look, but they are a great basis to start from. The individual pages can be exported into…

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Deploy a complex…

Last change: 2025-10-06 Next.js version: 15.4.7 Ruby version 3.4.5 Kamal version: 2.7.0 Introduction This builds on my previous post which describes how to deploy a relatively simple Next.js application with Kamal to a VPS. Simple meaning that there weren't any environment variables and not database. This post describes how to deploy a more complete Next.js application using BetterAuth for authentication, Drizzle ORM and a Postgres database. We are deploying to a single beefier VPS on Hetzner (ARM 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 10GB Volume). In contrast to the other post we are also using Docker Hub instead of the Scaleway Docker repository as I found it unreliable on my mobile connection. The upsides to deploy all of this to a single VPS compared to more elaborate setups with a load balancers, multiple application servers and a separate database server. Lower costs since only one server Less complex setup The downsides are No failover in case the server looses connection Limited scalability Server…

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Deploy a Next.js…

Last Change: 2025-09-19 Next.js version: 15.4.7 Ruby version 3.4.5 Kamal version: 2.7.0 Why Vercel is a wonderful service. There is no simpler way to deploy a web application based on Next. There is just one problem you face as a European: It is a service run by a US company. That means it falls under US law regarding data sharing with the government and more often than not these days European customers are not willing to accept that. They want their data stored on servers located in Europe, run by European companies. That means we have to leave the comfort of deploying with Vercel and all the awesome features it provides. There is no European version of it - not yet anyway. So we turn to the good old VPS and deploy there using Kamal. I will describe how to deploy a simple Next.js app on a single VPS. Setup You need a Next.js project and kamal installed which requires Ruby. I recommend using rbenv. After setting up Ruby run gem install kamal You also need Docker - I used the regular…

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