Scraping websites and bot-protection
While searching for my ancestors, I had to access data from many different websites. I noticed there were different levels of protection against automated access depending on the site. In this post, I
A Java Geek
馃 Developer Advocate for Apache APISIX 鉁嶏笍 Blogger at http://blog.frankel.ch 馃帗 Learner 馃摉 Author of https://leanpub.com/integrationtest
Latest articles
World geography gotchas
Years ago, a colleague of mine told me about two pockets of foreign land surrounded by Switzerland: Campione d'Italia and B眉singen am Hochrhein, respectively Italy and Germany. Both are enclaves of th
AI-assisted genealogy
My son recently came to me to brag about using AI to find our ancestors. While the results were correct, I didn't learn anything new, as it stopped at my grandparents. I was never very interested in m
Solving Gradle metadata and Renovate integration
My current company has settled on using Gradle. It doesn't make me very happy, but you need to learn to work with constraints. Plus, I must admit that the developers who actually implemented the build
GitHub agentic workflows and Renovate
I've been a big fan of Renovate for a couple of years already. Renovate scans your repositories, detects outdated package versions, and opens pull requests to automatically bump them. It's similar to
Two nasty surprises in Home Assistant's config
Last year, I motorized the rolling shutters on the southern fa莽ade of my apartment. My idea was to manage them via Home Assistant. I had a couple of automations in mind: In the evening, roll down the
On programming languages, targets, and platforms
I started as a Java developer, but for some time now, I have broadened my horizons. Recently, I thought about how early languages were dedicated to a single target and platform, and now they are broad
AI gateways: why and how
Before working for 2 years on the Apache APISIX API gateway, I was mainly oblivious to API gateways. It's only by working with them that I understood their value. Decoupling the client and the server
Seasons time-lapse - alignment
In the previous post, I described the Seasons project: a time-lapse of hundreds of pictures taken from nearly the same viewpoint over the years. The hardest challenge wasn't taking the pictures or ass
