May 16, 2024 ⋅ 4 min read
Today is Global Accessibility Awareness Day, a perfect time to reflect on how we can make our iOS apps more inclusive. Imagine trying to use an app where you can’t read the text, interact with buttons, or navigate at all. Sounds unnecessarily frustrating, right? That’s still sadly the reality for many people who are dependent on assistive technologies in their life. But as developers, we have the power to ensure our apps are accessible and usable for everyone.
Feb 4, 2024 ⋅ 12 min read
It’s February 4th, 2024, and it took me multiple weeks to write this post... 🙈 In 2023, I didn’t share my thoughts on 2022 because I was sick and felt extremly tired at the end of the year. A few months later, I regretted not taking the time to reflect. At the end of 2023, I was sick again (like every 5th person in Germany), and I felt unmotivated for various reasons. But a bit delayed, I’ll share my thoughts about 2023 now!
Apr 18, 2023 ⋅ 2 min read
Last week, I gave my first external conference talk at MiXiT conference in Lyon, France! Yay! 🥳 Besides being quite nervous obviously, I had a great experience on stage!
Mar 10, 2023 ⋅ 6 min read
I’ve always silently struggled with the conflict of trying to make the content that I create as accessible as possible and on the other side I create these completely inaccessible sketchnotes because they’re made of images and not text. I used to add image descriptions to the sketchnotes, but the descriptions were quite short and very non-descriptive. Usually it just was something like "Sketchnote about X, Y, Z" and that’s it. But I want to do better!
Dec 4, 2022 ⋅ 8 min read
A week ago, I wanted to speak at a local meetup called She ’n IT about my way into IT, but I had to cancel last minute because I was sick. 🤧 I will get another chance to talk about it in the future, but because I really love hearing other people’s stories, especially other stories from women in tech, I decided to write my story down in form of a blog post.
Jan 23, 2022 ⋅ 1 min read
Typos in code can always happen, we’re all human. Most of us aren’t native speakers and write their code in English anyway. But typos in code can be annoying. Other developers will eventually stumble across them and can get distracted reading the code. At best, they will fix the typo, but it will be bit of work to make the change, commit the code etc. It would be better not to introduce typos in the first place, right? Someone should be alerting us to typos as we write the code! Well, Xcode can actually do that!
Jan 1, 2022 ⋅ 16 min read
In 2021 I... learned how to longboard; quit my first job and joined Spotify; had my first viral tweet with a sketchnote of WWDC keynote; climbed 135 routes, most of them outdoors; created over a hundred sketchnotes, 40 of them are uploaded on this website
Sep 25, 2021 ⋅ 1 min read
It’s been a year now since I started learning to swim freestyle. At that time I couldn’t even do two strokes before I started having panic attacks and needed a break to breathe.
Aug 22, 2021 ⋅ 9 min read
About ten months ago, I started to feel unmotivated, stressed and annoyed very often. I quickly became emotional and thought about little things until late at night. I couldn’t concentrate and was restless and driveless. At this point, I had been working from home for six months and felt like I could never switch off from work and every day felt like the other (thanks to social distancing and lockdowns). I realised I wasn’t doing well and thought about how I could improve my work-life balance and set more boundaries to force myself to focus on things other than work again. I tried to remind myself that work isn’t the only thing that defines my worth.
Mar 15, 2021 ⋅ 5 min read
After my first technical interviews in years, I have found that it’s always a good idea to refresh your knowledge and prepare for technical interview questions (who would’ve thought) 😅 Although I knew what the questions were about, I found it difficult to talk about details and explain topics spontaneously. To be less freaked out when an interviewer asks me about capture lists or memory management in Swift, I wanted to make some sketchnotes on possible interview topics. They would be perfect as a summary. And if they help me, maybe they’ll help you too.
Feb 14, 2021 ⋅ 9 min read
I have a confession to make. It’s really sad, but true. In my career as an iOS developer, I’ve only ever build iPhone apps. iPads were never meant to be supported. Well... the apps "worked" in theory! Sort of. So, during my vacation in December, it was finally time to start working on the two-plus years old ticket to add iPad and iPhone landscape support for Cineaste App.
Dec 30, 2020 ⋅ 14 min read
One year ago, I wrote down the most important things for me from 2019. I really liked it, because it helped me to process the year and to remember what happened. Obviously, 2020 is marked by the pandemic. I wish so badly that this will be over soon! A few days ago, I watched "Soul" and it reminded me not to wait for something but to enjoy the little things. So, I need to write this down to remember myself that not everything was bad and that I’ve learned and experienced a lot.
Oct 11, 2020 ⋅ 6 min read
Since 2018, I make sketchnotes of conference talks and lots of other things. I’ve always used pen and paper for it. As an iOS developer, I spend much of my time on my MacBook and my iPhone and somehow I wanted to hide from all the digital stuff. I also love to have one book with all sketchnotes, and to be able to browse through the book and remember everything easily.
May 20, 2020 ⋅ 4 min read
I love visiting conferences! But two days full of conference talks are hard! It’s hard for your brain to stay focused and to process the things you’ve heard. It’s hard for your back when you sit on your chair all the time, not only during the talks but also during the little breaks when you join sessions to meet others. It’s hard for your fingers when you make sketchnotes two days long.
Mar 28, 2020 ⋅ 8 min read
When I released my website in January 2020, I was a hundred percent sure, that I wanted to add my sketchnotes in it as well... but I needed more time to think about how to implement it and I was also unsure about how the layout and navigation should look like.
Jan 12, 2020 ⋅ 4 min read
The last days, I migrated some of my open source repositories from Travis CI to GitHub Actions. I only used Travis for running tests or linter, nothing too complicated.
Dec 30, 2019 ⋅ 13 min read
"If you loved it, you should write a blog post on it." Following this motto, I decided to write down some thoughts about 2019.
May 16, 2019 ⋅ 8 min read
Is it really important to build mobile apps with accessibility features and who needs them? Deep down, everyone of us knows that when we don’t support accessibility features in our products, we leave users behind. But in reality, we all find tons of excuses for not going that extra mile …