Now and then I want to create PDFs and optimize the file size. I'm not necessarily in the mood to add another PDF software to my computer, and, depending on the content of the document, I don't want to complete the task online. In this situation, you can do well with Ghostscript.

The first thing you have to do is install Ghostscript on your computer. On a Mac with Homebrew, you can accomplish this with the following command:

brew install ghostscript

To optimize a PDF, I use the following command.

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile="output.pdf" input.pdf

Following "Digital Minimalism," "Deep Work" was the second book by Cal Newport that I immersed myself into. The former had an overemphasis on "success stories" which seemed disruptive to me, but in "Deep Work," Newport strikes the right balance, in my opinion.

In early 2020, I discovered Cal Newport's book "Digital Minimalism", a discovery inspired in part by Marcel's insightful blog post on the subject.

A few weeks ago, I decided to reactivate my podcast, "Herr Zenzes wills wissen". For the last few years, I hosted it with Podigee, but it became too expensive for my use case. I don't produce enough content to take full advantage of the smallest package, so I can save some money by hosting the podcast myself again.

April has started with a few minor updates that I'd like to share here on the blog.

There are topics in the IT world that divide opinions: what needs to be tested, test-driven development, do we work alone, in pairs or even in a mob? Do we need estimates for tickets?

Today I want to discuss estimates and why I think they are essential in a dev team. I realize many developers see it differently because estimates have an awful reputation. Critics say that they don't bring much to the team, take a lot of time in meetings and at the end "management" gets a statement when which feature is (guaranteed) available. In the sprint, people are then also quick to talk about why a supposedly small task is taking a long time. So, we have something that costs us a lot of time as developers and makes life difficult afterward because someone converts story points into time. And sure, if that's how estimates are lived in team, then I would question them in that form as well. But estimates can also be useful, help the team and help to plan things.

Zsh (default on macOS) and Oh My Zsh are among the tools I set up first on every machine. Yesterday I took a look at Antigen, a plugin manager for Zsh, and I was impressed with how well it simplified my previous configuration.

Today I updated an article that is about automatically switching Node.js version with nvm. In the course of this I wanted to delete two old articles and bring them to the current article via an HTTP redirect.

As I host my blog on Netlify, all I need is a _redirects file with the redirects:

As a frontend developer, you may find yourself working on projects that require different versions of Node.js. Manually switching between versions can be tedious and easy to forget, especially if you're working on multiple projects simultaneously. Fortunately, there's a way to automate switching to the correct Node.js version whenever you enter the project directory. In this post, I'll show you how to set up auto-switching using nvm and zsh.

In one of my previous articles I described the difference between strategy and tactics in software development. In this post I want to describe, what can go wrong, if you focus on tactics and ignore the overall strategy. Lets take a situation I have seen at many companies: a new project is born and some people can create something from scratch. Most of the times this means that technology decisions that have been made before, can be questioned and the new scope maybe allows to try out something new. Maybe something that is easier to use or faster to setup. This can have both positive and negative consequences: