fkr - exploration is key to excellence

FOSDEM 2026, some Univention Summit and Building Europe's Public Digital Infrastructure

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

FOSDEM 2026 is already more than a week old, currently tons of stuff going on. Like every year FOSDEM was a blast. Before heading to FOSDEM another “like every year”-experience was on: Univention Summit. It was the 18th Univention Summit and once again increased in size of attendees. The UV Summit switch to a two day programm (in the past the second day was not really conference programm, but workshops). Together with Jutta Horstmann (CO-CEO Heinlein Group / WG Public Affairs OSBA), Dirk Gernhardt (City of Munich), Dr. Martin Hagen (City of Bremen), Leonhard Kugler (ZenDiS) and I were part of a panel on the “Deutschland-Stack” on the second day and I represented the SCS views in the round. See this post.

For many years, I referred to the Univention Summit as the “New Years Reception of the german open source business scene”. This I need to revise. For once, it is not only the “german” (or for that matter DACH) region anymore. Some talks and even the panel on the first day were in english (and the whole event was live translated iinto english) - BUT it has become a hotspot for all and everything “digital sovereign” (in a positiv sense).

At FOSDEM we (SCS) organized the Devroom “Building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure” together with the ZenDiS. This was the second year that we did a joint devroom and it was a blast. A short roundup can be found on LinkedIn. We’ve had excellent talks in the room. You should watch all of them. If you can only watch one of them, watch this.

What I find mind boggling: The topic of Digital Sovereignty is so often still seen only under the aspects of current geo politics. While this of course makes the giant dependence on US companies and technology visible the striving for digital sovereignty is about so much more. This episode of the Cloud Cast is a good example for the - imho - short comings of the discussion.

Principles matter or on the importance of a mission statement

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Through some conversations in the last few weeks, it became important to me to write a few sentences on principles. While often people differentiate between work and private life, I’m in the camp that when it comes to certain things there is no business or work side of things. It is the same person that acts, and I’m always acting within the context of the person that I am. Just as with purpose, I hold it with the following quote of Henry Rollins:

No such thing as spare time, no such thing as free time, no such thing as down time. All you got is life time. Go.

My set of principles has accompanied me for a long time already. From very early on we had a “No Bullshit Policy” at the first company (bytemine GmbH) I founded. The “No Bullshit Policy” was to make sure, that we’re always transparent and honest to our customers. For our customers it meant, that they could trust our statements - even if we made mistakes. For the people working at bytemine it meant a healthy culture and psychological safety.

About ten years ago I wrote them down for the first time. I actually do have a copy in my wallet as well as on my desk. They serve well in difficult decision-making, as small reminders in daily life or reminding me to stick to them no matter how hard it seems. Since I wrote them down for the first time they’ve seen some small refinements in wording and additions (for example, when my son was born). In the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey (personally, I find it is a terrible title for the book. Since the title can be interpreted as some kind of “highly optimize your life”-bullshit, which the book definitely is not!) principles or mission statements are considered a flight corridor that airplanes have. When an commercial airplanes travels from London to New York, it has a fairly definite course, but within this course (the flight corridor) it moves a bit left and right / up and down. The original variant is in German. The wording is on purpose, straightforward, and simple.

I am committed

I am an idealist

I have time

I smile

I create added value

I live sustainably and economically

I live consciously

I am well-read

I am confident

I understand before I form an opinion

I see my fellow human beings as a whole and not just their actions

I have my own opinion and stand up for it

I am reliable and honest

I am a loving father and husband

I make time for my family

I am respectful and appreciative

I am grateful

I am open to feedback and listen

I don’t do things to please others, I do them right

I am aware of the consequences of my actions

The talk that Rosanna Sibora gave in the “Building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure” devroom at FOSDEM 2026 reminded me, that it is an important time right now to be verbose on these topics. It is a good time to talk more publically about the importance of having a backbone.

Univention Summit 2026 - "Panel - Anforderungen an den Deutschland Stack"

Wed, 28 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Im Rahmen des Univention Summit 2026 habe ich den Sovereign Cloud Stack bei der Panel-Diskussion “Anforderungen an den Deutschland Stack” vertreten.

Aufzeichnung auf Youtube

Alternativer Download des Videos (ohne youtube)

Keeping things simple - even if introducing Standard Operating Procedures (SOP)

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Every now and then situations require a slim way of introducing documented processes to assure reproduceable outcomes and to achieve a certain quality. Yes - this is a discipline for which there are tons of frameworks, even more books and you can hire highly certified consultants ;) If the scope is to assist your team with its growth, it might be enough to just keep it very simple and just give a little guidance. A client of mine asked me last year to write them a small framework to get started with Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). I’ve worked with SOPs a lot in the past and at one point we even aligned an ISO 27001 process along well defined SOPs. Yet, in its most basic ways all that is needed are simple, well-defined templates and some examples.

Simple SOP framework

I’ve assembled a very simple set of templates with some examples. Those are available in english and german. The work is MIT licensed.

Repository: https://git.sr.ht/~fkr/sop.

You can easily throw it in the wiki of your choice or just directly work within a git repository with it.

However when working with this and the client, I wanted to make it even more accessable. Accessable for people who don’t want to fiddle with git AND at the same time have it in the best accessable way for the tech-savy people in the team (eg. in a git repository).

Gollum-SOP

Gollum is a git-based Wiki. Gollum-SOP is an opinionated setup of Gollum in order to provide a lean and simple way of documenting Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs).

Gollum-SOP bundles gollum-auth with a custom patch to make it working with Gollum version 6. Furthermore some custom additions are added through config.ru.

To get started, you place a clone of the SOP repository as wiki into the Gollum-SOP checkout before starting it. Gollum-SOP comes with a dockerfile to get easily started.

2026 - CW 03 - The one that really kicked of the year 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This was the first complete work week of 2027 for me. Last week we had our (from within the OSBA ECO:DIGIT Team) green coding workshop with the BMKUKN and University of applied science of Bremerhaven. A comprehensive summary in german by the HS Bremerhaven is available here.

Listening this week

The latest episode of the Oxide and Friends, Engineering Rigor in deh LLM Age podcast discusses the use of LLMs in software engineering / software development. And aside from all the hype and loads of bullshit around that topic, one can’t deny that there are relevant use-cases and scenarios. This episode highlights that and very much resonated with me. Definitly worthwhile listening. Their predictions episode with the 1, 3 and 6 year predictions is also worthwhile.

Podcast-listening wise this week the Software Engineering Radio episode on Modern CLIs with Eric Schaefer was also worth listening too.

SCS in the D-Stack

On Friday, January 16th, a fairly big news items (relating to my work) became public: The first summary of the consultation for the D-Stack was published: Gesamtbild and in the section of Managed Services und Cloud it states:

There are currently no specific standards for managed services. However, it is specified that
[…]
Standards from the German Administration Cloud (“Deutsche Verwaltungscloud” == DVC), OpenStack, and Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) must be complied with.

We’ll see how much this means in reality, however I much rather have SCS being referenced here than not. Obiviously we bring a lot to the table and combined with the input of others this can be leveraged to a really good next level. I’d really like to see how we can jointly work on bringing the “Detailstandards der DVC” with the SCS-Standards closer together. Especially if one looks at the DS 44, DS54 and DS 54 one sees how they complement the SCS Standards for KaaS.

FOSDEM upcoming

The schedule for the Building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure devroom is nicely filled with lots of interesting talks. We (the SCS Community) are organizing this jointly with the ZenDiS. As every year, I’m really looking forward to FOSDEM. Afterwards I will be heading to Ghent for CfgMgmgtCamp.

Currently reading

I finally started reading the much appraised “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Had this on my list for ages. Around christmas I started listening to the audio version of “Empires of AI” by Karen Hao. Am about half way trough and so far it has been interesting.

Hero Kids or how my son discovers the joy of pen & paper RPG

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Since my (almost) seven-year-old son has enjoyed listening to stories that I make up on the run while giving him choices on how to continue the story, I started considering introducing him to the world of pen-and-paper roleplaying games. While at 39C3 there were RPG sessions for kids (without any specific ruleset). We did not attend those, but afterward I started researching which ruleset would be appropriate.

Hero Kids

I quickly came across Hero Kids - which appealed to me since the content has been translated to various languages, including German (our mother tongue). While I feel comfortable to also translate on the fly, this does make things a tad easier. The intro page to the game is here. Hero Kinds has been created by Justin Halliday.

Everything is available through DriveThruRPG and there are several bundles available.

First Steps

The rule book comes with a first adventure, and the rule book has some predefined characters. While we were going over the pre-defined characters, exactly what I hoped for happened: “Can I create my own character?” my son asked. Wohooo - of course: let’s go!

Hero Kids is targeted at kids between the ages of 4 and 10. Especially if you like improvising. and creating your own style in Hero Kids is fun, since it easily lets you adapt stuff.

We played the initial adventure, ‘Basement O Rats’ and it became clear that he was hooked on the game.

Monster Compendium

The Monster Compendium comes with many printable figures, and my son really likes “building” (cutting them out and gluing them to a cardboard foot) with me. Together with the Brecken Vale Gazetteer these are perfect resources for extending the games.

Fire in Rivenshore

The next adventure we played was Fire in Rivenshore which actually features not only a good story about helping and making some though decisions but also a moral dilemma. It was interesting to see how my son approached that. So far we’ve only played among us two - next step is to assemble a small group with his friends and see how that works out. :)

I’m now off preparing the next adventure for us to dive in!

IT-Tage Dezember 2025 - "Sovereign Cloud Stack – Zertifizierbare Standards für digital souveränes Cloud-Computing"

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0100

Bei der 2025er Edition der IT-Tage in Frankfurt hab ich im Rahmen des “Digitale Souveränität”-Track einen Vortrag zu den zertifizierbaren Standards und der Zertifizierung im Sovereign Cloud Stack gehalten. Der Vortrag wurde leider nicht aufgezeichnet.

Die Folien gibt es hier.

openCode Connect August 2025

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0200

Zusammen mit Friederike Zelke war ich bei openCode Connect zu Gast und hab zum Sovereign Cloud Stack referiert. Das war eine tolle Veranstaltung und das ZenDiS ist ein toller Gastgeber und hat mit openCode Connect eine gelungene Veranstaltungsreihe.

Die Folien gibt es hier.

Deep-Link zur Folge.

(alternativer Download)

Oh - hey Immich - Part 2 of many of moving off platforms

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

(Update from 2025/11/22: I came across this post by Drew DeVault regarding FUTO, the company behind immich. No conclusion from my side yet, but as an fyi.)

I’m lazy. And over the years, I grew very comfortable with certain features and services. One of these is Apple Photos in combination with iCloud photos. We’ve been using it for years. In the life before that, I used Piwigo. But I stopped using my own Piwigo instance in 2021 for good.

Recently, I got the urge (doh — guess why ;) ) to revisit taking this into my own hands again. Especially since I’m “dual-devicing” (is that a term?) with a de-googled Fairphone that I run alongside my iPhone. Actually: the Fairphone is my main phone currently (different story; will dive into that in a separate post).

I came across this blog post that got me curious about immich.

Enter immich

Immich is a self-hosted photo (and video) solution that is openly developed and licensed under the AGPLv3. Furthermore, the whole ecosystem, such as mobile applications, are also open source and licensed accordingly. Apps are available for iOS as well as Android. For Android, the immich app is available via F-Droid as well. Immich is family-compatible and not just a fiddly-nerd solution :).

It is easily deployable as a set of Docker containers via docker compose. This is one of the recommended ways of setting up immich. The documentation is good so that there is no need to replicate it here.

Importing to immich

Importing to immich is — thanks to the immich-cli — effortless. The cli allows for recursive importing, and thanks to detecting duplicates it can also rerun multiple times. The following example will import the local directory ./export and everything below it to the immich instance available at immich-server:2283 (which in my case is the instance of immich running on the same host in Docker).

$ docker run -it -v "$(pwd)":/import:ro -v ./export:/upload:ro -e IMMICH_INSTANCE_URL=http://immich-server:2283/api -e IMMICH_API_KEY=$IMICH_API_KEY --network immich_network ghcr.io/immich-app/immich-cli:latest upload /upload --recursive --album

The --album will cause immich-cli to create an album named the same as each directory.

Before importing is exporting

For exporting from Apple Photos, the best way is to use osxphotos. A command line like this will do:

$ osxphotos export yourFolder --skip-original-if-edited --sidecar XMP --touch-file --directory “{folder_album}” --download-missing

For importing my piwigo-data, I just used the data directory from my piwigo install, there I already had all the photos in a directory structure resembling my albums.

Hello Audiobookshelf - Part 1 of many of moving off platforms

Sat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0200

I’ve been meaning to dodge audible for ages. I’ve stopped ordering stuff from Amazon years ago, but leaving audible was more of a hurdle. I really like audiobooks. Furthermore, I like reading, but I also enjoy listening to certain books. Some books I have for reading as well, as listening. I’ve been on Audible for a long time. As such, in my catalog there was fairly large. Leaving audible does not only imply that I have to make sure to not throw away all the audiobooks, but also that I want to have some comfortable way of listening to audiobooks in the future: my existing ones as well as new ones that I purchase.

Replacing audible — where to buy from instead?

A while ago, I came across Libro.fm. Libro.fm is not just an audible alternative but is actually an excellent way to purchase audiobooks. When creating an account with Libro.fm, one can configure a local bookstore that should receive compensation when purchases are done through Libro.fm. When purchasing an audiobook through Libro.fm one actually owns the files, so that Libro.fm directly offers to download the corresponding files. Libro.fm does offer an iOS and Android app as well.

Exiting audible — downloading all content

There are various ways to retrieve audible content. One good way is to use Libation. While it is not the most intuitive software, it will work through your collection just fine.

Easy cross-device listening

While Libro.fm comes with an iOS and Android app, this does not do the job for me, since I want to access all the old audiobooks as well. Ideally, I can access all my audiobooks through the same app. Well, thankfully, there is a bunch of self-hosting servers for media content. First I looked at ampache to Address music as well as audiobooks — however, the support for audiobooks in ampache is fairly limited. Then I discovered audiobookshelf. As the name suggests, audiobookshelf addresses audiobooks (well, and to some extent podcasts) and only audiobooks. Which suits me well: Do one thing and do this excellent. ;)

According to this page the audiobookshelf people are working on an official app. The app just as audiobookshelf itself are open source licensed under the GPL-3.

Aside from the official app, there are other apps out there for iOS as well as Android. For Android, there is even Lissen in F-Droid. On iOS, there is plappa.

Since the testflight beta is full, I had no chance of testing the official iOS app and went with plappa for now. On my (iodeos-based) Fairphone I went with Lissen from F-Droid for now.

The documentation is good, so that there is no need to reproduce it here with smart comments ;) Nevertheless a few hints on how I run it: I run it from docker and made sure to have /metadata as well as /config mounted from the host. That way these can easily be backed up. Audiobookshelf never touches the original audio files but instead saves any metadata alongside (either below the metadata directory or if configured to do so next to the audiofiles).

F-Droid or not to F-Droid?

Apparently whether or not and how to get this into F-Droid has been a topic.

2025/04/27 - Update

I discovered that the official Audiobookshelf app is available on F-Droid through apt.izzysoft.de.