Posts on marco.ninja

Excalidraw Figures in Hugo

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 04:35:15 +0000

I love drawing things, especially in Excalidraw! I also need more dark mode support in my life.

In this post I’ll go through how I made Excalidraw exports render nicely on my blog in a light or dark mode aware fashion.

Introducing snippethost.gitlab.io

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 18:39:41 +0000

It is no secret that I’m no big fan of GitHub and it’s dominance in the VCS-ecosystem.

So in an effort of leveling the playing field I’m taking it onto myself to build more cool things for and with my VCS of choice, GitLab!

Devlog 2026-01-04

Sun, 04 Jan 2026 18:39:41 +0000

Over the holidays I’ve been diving deep into build systems in general and container builds in particular.

Static Site Generator Fulltext Search

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 16:29:12 +0000

I recently rebuilt my blog from scratch, see the previous post in this series.

One thing I wanted to add was site-wide search without any external dependencies. Since I have previous experience with a tool called pagefind, which is perfect for this use case, I implemented it with that.

Remaking My Blog From Scratch

Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been blogging in one form or another for 5 years now.

All blogs and other online publishing adventures had one thing in common: I barely knew what I was doing, using components I never learned properly.

I wanted to change that! And with the benefit of hindsight I will now take you on this adventure with me.

Guest Appearance: Nginx Community Chats

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I had the pleasure of joining Dave McAllister, Senior Open Source Technologist for NGINX, on the NGINX Community Chats to talk about tech playground.

My First Show Hacker News

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A while back I built tech-playground.com, which I describe like this:

A playground that runs your config on real servers for you, a bit like CodePen for server tech.

Debugging Container Workloads

Mon, 04 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Debugging container workloads can be a challenge sometimes, especially when running them in k8s, behind a reverse proxy or in other, possibly complex, traffic flow scenarios.

Copy & Paste Is Dangerous

Sat, 07 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Copy & paste from untrusted sources on the internet into the terminal is a really bad idea! Early in my career I did it too and still often see others doing it.

My Publishing Pipeline

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

I write an extensive personal knowledge base using markdown, code-server and a variety of other tools. Originally, in 2021, I wanted to have something like Obsidian Publish but self-hosted, so I created it.

Over time my knowledge base evolved more into a second brain, tracking not only my technical notes and journal, but also things like recipes and hikes. With this my publishing pipeline, and the script at it’s core, extended in a multitude of ways.

The (MVP) Making of PodHistory

Sun, 06 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I share my process for building the MVP for PodHistory, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.

Simple Self Organization

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This is a guide to a simple self organization/task management system I built for myself over the years.

From time to time I showed it to someone and they got some benefits from it, most adapted it to better fit their needs down the line, which is exactly what you should do with any kind of personal task management in my opinion.

Hack Things Together

Thu, 27 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes you have to do a specific task and you are fully capable of doing it manually, however those tasks are also great to flex your muscles and hack something together.

They can be an excellent tool to sharpen your skills with the tools you use regularly, and improve your quick prototyping skills.

In addition, with a couple of iterations, again sharpening an important skill, you could afterwards create a more general purpose tool from a hacky script.

My Thoughts on AI in Blogging

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Given the recent rise in text-based language models, sometimes called AI tools, I wanted to share my thoughts and experiences in using them, especially in the context of blogging.

What to Do With Your Own Server

Sun, 19 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Now that we have talked about the benefits of running your own server and how to run your own server let’s take a look at some things you could run on your own personal server and some things you should better not.

How to Run Your Own Server

Sat, 18 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

There are many ways to run your own server, from setting up a Raspberry Pi on your desk to renting a physical server at a provider.

In this post, we will focus on setting up a virtual server with DigitalOcean, which is one of the easiest ways to get started.

Benefits of Running Your Own Server

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the world of technology, we are moving further and further away from operating directly on servers, but there are still significant benefits to be gained from running a personal server.

I have been running some kind of personal server for many years now and I strongly believe anyone working in technology can benefit greatly from doing so. Here’s why:

The (MVP) Making of Honeypot Login

Sun, 12 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In this post I will go over the MVP building phase of Honeypot Login, from idea to launched product and what my next steps will be.

Self-Hosted Notifications

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Running any kind of personal infrastructure sometimes requires your attention based on certain events or failure states, no matter how much you automate tasks.

Over the years I have used E-Mail, Telegram bots and a variety of other tools for this purpose. However all of them have the drawback that they mix with other kinds of information and are not easilly usable in scripts.

Post Mortems

Mon, 22 Aug 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Incidents happen, and we can and should always learn from them, to be better prepared for the next time things go wrong.

A great tool to do that is the post-mortem, it is a process designed to recap the incident, learn from mistakes and improve the system as a result.

Monoliths & Microservices

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since diving into the software development world I was troubled by a duality:

On the one hand I have built and operated many services described as monolithic with relative ease, on the other hand I’m always told I, and others, should build microservices because they are better in a variety of ways.

With this post I’m going to compare both software architectures by looking at the key benefits often associated with microservices and additional considerations I think are important.

The WSL Onion

Wed, 06 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The other day I was playing around in WSL with a colleague of mine and we did this:

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2: Debian & Podman

Mon, 04 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

The problem: Docker itself can’t be run in WSL2 as it requires the docker daemon, usually run though systemd.

The solution: Podman works just fine and can easily be installed, although we will need to configure some things to make it work properly.

Going Part Time

Sun, 03 Apr 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Starting on the first of March 2022 I no longer work full-time in my day job.

That sentence has been about a year in the making and makes me both happy and a bit scared about the future.

Simple HTTP Status Monitor Using Curl

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Using some output redirection and the --write-out parameter we can produce a script that simply outputs the status code of a curl request.

Publish Parts of Obsidian to My Personal Site

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The idea at the start was simple. Do something like Obsidian Publish , so read frontmatter and if it contains published: True put it up on a website to view.

GitLab Merge Request From the CLI

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

You want to push a branch to GitLab and automatically create a Merge Request (MR) for it.

There are effectively three scenarios this can cover:

Create a MR in draft state with a custom title
Create a MR
Create a MR and automatically merge if CI/CD pipeline succeeds

Linked: Powershell PSDefaultParameterValues

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I published a post about how to work with parameter defaults in PowerShell over on the ScriptRunner blog.

Read now: English or Deutsch

The Null-Coalescing Operator

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Today we take a closer look at the null-coalescing operator and how it can help us in writing smarter, more concise scripts.

Gumlab

Mon, 04 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

As part of my goal to write a book I began looking at how to build a following and where to sell the book once it’s finished.

On this journey I found Gumroad, a great place to sell digital products.

Given my idea to sell a comprehensive library of code snippets besides the actual book I took a look at existing integrations between it and GitLab.com, my preferred git host.

Unfortunately I could not find any ready made solution, but given the great APIs from Gumroad and GitLab I set out to build one. The result is GumLab, a easy way to sell access to GiLab projects through Gumroad.

Delete Your Old VMware Snapshots

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For the love of Pete, please delete your old snapshots regularly!

Old snapshots have caused incidents and even outages more than once in my career and it is really easy to preemptively look for them and get them removed before anything happens.

How to Find With PowerShell

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Finding files, do I even need to describe how important this is?

Looking Back at 2020, Four Months of Blogging

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

The year is coming to an end, with all its ups and downs 2020 surely was challenging to say the least. I wanted to take this time to openly reflect on my first couple months of blogging and what the future holds for ps1.guru

Affiliate Links

Thu, 17 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Lets talk about affiliate links for a moment.

TLDR: I will use affiliate links where it is possible for me, which isn’t often to be honest.

Super-Charged Cmdlet Aliases

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently wrote a post about PowerShell Aliasing for the folks over at ScriptRunner.

The one issue I had while researching for this post was this:

You can not create a alias for a function and overwrite one of it’s parameters at the same time while keeping nice features like tab-complete.

For a concrete example of this visit please look at the original post.

At the end of the post I asked if anyone had a solution to this problem - and the internet delivered!

Linked: Powershell Aliasing

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I published a post about aliasing with PowerShell over on the ScriptRunner blog.

Read now: English or Deutsch

Powershell 7

Sat, 28 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Q: Wait a minute! Don’t I already have PowerShell?

A: Yes. However you may want to continue reading because things are never as simple as they appear.

Collections And Randomization

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Randomizing a collection is useful in a variety of situations and in most languages it is fairly straight forward.

How To Grep With PowerShell

Wed, 30 Sep 2020 12:15:00 +0200

Filtering data, from log or config files to data returned by an api, is an important operation to remove noise from it and make further analysis possible.

How to Tail With PowerShell

Mon, 21 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Printing the last or first, few lines of a file is a common operation in day to day operations. On Linux most people will, without thinking twice, use tail and it’s counterpart head to achieve this.

Bash Utilities in Powershell

Sun, 20 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Whats the first thing coming to mind when seeing a command line?

For most people it is Linux, be it Ubuntu, Debian or RedHat. And it is completely understandable. A big part of our industry has a background in Linux and sees it as the superior system for quick scripts and the like.

Hello World

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000