Blog.
Someone Used a Hacked Farm Shop to Phish Me
A contact form enquiry from a Lancashire farm shop turned out to be a phishing campaign running out of a compromised WordPress site. Here's how it unfolded, what gave it away, and what the attackers were actually after.
The Client Who Knew Best (And Saved Me From Myself)
I put real work into scoping a digitalization project for a small cultural institution. Then the client told me which database to use, and things got interesting.
Four Clouds in Three Years: What Running a Side Project Actually Costs
EventSpotter has run on AWS, two different Azure setups, and now Hetzner. There was no grand plan. Here's how it actually happened, what each era cost, and where things stand today.
What I Learned From My First Startup Job
A year at an Austrian startup taught me more than I expected, mostly through things going wrong. Here's what I'd do differently, and what surprised me most on the way out.
I Founded a Legal Entity for My Side Project. Then I Dissolved It.
Most side projects stay informal forever. EventSpotter briefly had a registered legal entity, a board of directors, and its own bank account. Here's why we formed it, why we dissolved it, and why the project is doing just fine.
SBÄM Fest 2023: Great Bands, Questionable Everything Else
We spent two days at the SBÄM Fest 2023 at Pichlingersee in Linz. The lineup delivered. The organisation, the pricing, and the so-called 'cashless system'? Not so much.
How a One-Line Bug Cost Me $159 in a Single Night
I deployed a small change to my Spring Boot service on ECS, went to bed, and woke up to 10 budget alert emails. Here's what happened, how 238 GB of logs appeared overnight, and what I now have in place to stop it happening again.