Blog
Notes from the studio.
Articles and updates on engineering, product, and craft.
Cutting Old Braids: Shutting Down GrooveShouter and Launching Aeondera
"Alte Zöpfe abschneiden" — with the domains up for renewal anyway, it was time for a clean slate instead of paying for a project on life support.
The Survey That Ended GrooveShouter
I ran a public feedback survey to decide whether to keep investing in the project. The results were devastating — and that was okay.
Importing 51 Million Songs on a Budget: MusicBrainz + Elasticsearch
A weekly job that downloads 15GB of open music data and indexes 51 million tracks into Elasticsearch using under 4GB of RAM.
Integration Test Hell: An Honest CI War Story
Four days, forty commits, and commit messages like "asdf" and "cicicicicicici" — the unfiltered story of getting flaky integration tests green in CI.
Ten Weeks From First Commit to Public Beta
From the first line of code to a live public beta in ten weeks — and how the guest experience had to be redesigned almost immediately after go-live.
We Tried Server-Side Rendering — And Reverted It
An honest account of a reversed architecture decision: why SSR looked right on paper, and why it wasn't worth it for a solo-maintained app.
The CI/CD Rabbit Hole: What Self-Hosted GitLab Runners Don't Tell You
A brutally honest log of fighting Docker-in-Docker, TLS certificates, and multi-arch builds — until pivoting to buildah made it all click.
Betting on Angular + PWA Instead of Native Apps
Building native apps solo felt like too much overhead. Betting on Angular and Progressive Web Apps paid off — mostly.
Self-Hosting Everything: A Mini PC, Proxmox, and Saying No to Free Tiers
Shipping a side project with zero revenue means every free tier runs out fast. So I bought a cheap mini PC and hosted GitLab, YouTrack, and SonarQube myself.
The Idea That Started It All: From DJ Booth to Side Project
Before Aeondera existed, there was GrooveShouter — a scrappy side project born from missing a real connection with the crowd on the dancefloor.