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January 12, 2019 8 mins read

Engineering

Backing up a QNAP NAS With restic to Backblaze B2

Easy, fast and end-to-end encrypted backup of a QNAP NAS stored in the cloud at a fair price? Absolutely! Meet restic an open-source backup software with a great concept that many people trust. Paired with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, an affordable S3 storage, this makes a perfect combination for setting up an online backup solution. In this article I am going to walkthrough how I have setup the online backup for my QNAP NAS TS-451 using the Container station. Previously, I’ve had my online backup done with CrashPlan but since they’ve dropped support for personal backups I had to build a better solution.

September 16, 2018 5 mins read

Engineering

Running openHAB on a QNAP NAS with Docker

I have recently decided to start building a smart home. A colleague of mine who has lots of experience and even writes a blog about smart home has recommended me to take a look at openHAB. openHAB is an open-source IoT platform that is capable of integrating various standards and devices and therefore seemed like a perfect fit.

I first thought about installing openHAB on a Raspberry PI, but then decided to run it on my QNAP NAS, as the NAS is running anyways. As openHAB provides a Docker image and I already used the QNAP Container Station to run Crashplan online backup with Docker I immediately got excited and had to install openHAB with Docker on my QNAP NAS running QTS 4.3.

June 22, 2018 11 mins read

Architecture

12 Simple Ways to Ensure your Team's Code Aligns With Your Architecture

As a software architect, you have engineered and designed a wonderful architecture. The architecture meets functional as well as quality requirements and is now ready to be implemented.

One particularly difficult problem you will be facing is to ensure the code written by the developers actually implements the defined architecture. Don’t get me wrong here, we don’t want to blame the developers. Of course they have seen and read the architecture, but still, experience shows that divergence will happen. It might have been a tight deadline. Or it has been some while ago that developers actually looked at the architecture. Maybe they even understood you wrong while you explained the intended architecture.

May 30, 2018 3 mins read

Thoughts

Forwardspective: A Retrospective to Shape the Future

Retrospectives are great! It’s a simple and structured methodology to critically assess the most recent performance in a certain period of time. Developers know it, and good scrum teams keep on improving with retrospectives to become better and better.

According to the Scrum guidelines, a retrospective typically answers the following questions:

What went well?
What could be improved?
What will we commit to improve in the next sprint?

When doing retrospectives on a regular basis (like any good scrum team will do) continuous improvement is part of the process! Of course, things will only improve if actions are taken, but identifying the actions during the retrospective is the key step here.