Thomas Skowron

In 1903 the New York Times argued that human flight would take one to ten million years to develop.1 Just 69 days later, the brothers Wright took it to the skies.

Fotos von “Elarion, eine mächenhafte Tanzgeschichte im Rathaussaal Porz”, 2026, aufgenommen von Thomas Skowron (Instagram)

Many development projects have extra special strings that shall not be shared with others: keys, passwords, tokens.

When Hetzner, a popular German hosting provider, recently announced price hikes of more than 30% for their services1, this did not go unnoticed.

Got an idea?

Fundamentally there are two types of perspectives inside Open Source: true believers and opportunists.

Probably my favourite thing about the “Cloud Exit” from Basecamp that DHH is so vociferously writing about is that it has shifted the predisposition about Cloud usage.

Due to the unique political situation we are living in, there is an increased demand for European technology solutions.

For reasons not entirely understood to humankind, some software developers have an aversion to WYSIWYG: Typing into Microsoft Word1 and immediately seeing what the document looks like seems strangely alien.

A technique that helped me focus is journaling, by hand, on paper.

For the last five years, I’ve probably been writing more than ever, which you wouldn’t guess based on my publication schedule on my very own website (spoiler: it’s been four years!).

For a long time, sequential IDs were good enough for everything.

From time to time I work with planet-wide geospatial data, which in itself is nothing new, but I was in discontent with the ingestion stack I was using, so I built a stream processor.

Distributing the load of a web application or especially an API endpoint using a load balancer (LB) is highly useful: You can get better performance, make software rollouts smoother and withstand node failure.

This post combines one of the world’s oldest information technologies with one of the newer ones: Printing on paper and SwiftUI.

Applications often need to work with external IDs, e.g.

Wikis have changed the landscape of information technology: No matter what organisation you‘re in and what topic you‘re working on, chances are that there is a Wiki, in which you can collaborate with others.

It’s sunday and I am fiddling around to make some maps, maybe to put them up my own wall and that’s the moment where I usually stuggle to get data out of OpenStreetMap into QGIS: Overpass is slow and won’t give you too much data, Shapefiles are ok, but th…

Our annual FOSSGIS conference just ended prematurely on Friday.

Currently, several people I know hold unpaid board positions in non-profits.

Due to the recent spike in OpenStreetMap planet dump traffic, some people have wondered why so many users are redownloading the whole planet every week.

1 The de-facto standard for rendering OpenStreetMap data is PostgreSQL/PostGIS-based: The planet file or any extract is taken and then imported into the database.

For the full specification document, see Spaten, File Format Specification.

When building a location based service, access to public geo data like points of interest (POI) can be cumbersome and expensive.

In 2017 the Grandine project has been introduced, which helps working with geodata in a streamable fashion.

On prod this site should not be reachable, as the spaten directory listing should appear here.

This is a recap of my work and the subsequently gained learnings of the last two years.

Python web applications generally expose a WSGI interface for client communication, which is rather unusual if you are used to more novel approaches like those of Go applications, where APIs are generally served via HTTP.

In case you are able to read German and are interested in pursuing an Open Data strategy, you might want to look at my Guide to Open Data.

Continuation of the documentation of my Prototype Fund related work.

Continuation of the documentation of my Prototype Fund related work.

Continuation of the documentation of my Prototype Fund related work.

Continuation of the documentation of my Prototype Fund related work, for episode one see Grandine March Summary I continued to work on the effort to create a pipeline framework for working with OpenStreetMap data, starting with important ground work.

Some of you already might know that I am in the lucky, but stressful position of being funded for six months to work on Vector Tile related infrastructure.

Sorry, German only.

Warning!

With all the craziness in the world going on at the moment, founders and start-up enthusiasts are looking which place is worth moving to.

When Canon announced their new 5D model, the Mark IV, there was a lot of controversy about its 4K recording capabilities.

OpenStreetMap collects the information at which time a place is open, e.g. when can I shop at that place.

Lightroom has completely changed the way I work with photos, I really can’t imagine going back anymore.

After a rough start of Apple Maps in 2012, Apple has changed once again how their maps application works and looks.

Seit 1984 treffen sich jährlich Kreative zum Ende des Jahres, um am Chaos Communication Congress teilzunehmen.

Im harten Mappingalltag bei OpenStreetMap kommt manchmal das schönste der Gefühle viel zu kurz: die Liebe.

Wir beschäftigten uns gerade mit der Deutschen Bahn, was uns dazu verleitet hat, den Datensatz von OSM genauer zu betrachten.

Der unter anderem in Dresden tätige Verkehrverbund Oberelbe nutzt nun Daten (Gebäudeumrisse) aus OpenStreetMap (siehe Reiter “Karte”).