It’s been a while. The blog has been sitting there, largely unchanged, collecting dust and serving ads to anyone who happened to stumble across it. So I decided it was time for an overhaul.
New look, no ads#
The site has been rebuilt from scratch. Gone is WordPress, gone are the ads. What you’re looking at now is a static site generated by Hugo using the Blowfish theme. The entire site is a collection of Markdown files and a handful of config files — no database, no PHP, no plugin updates to worry about.
Comments are handled by Giscus, which uses GitHub Discussions as a backend. No ads, no third-party tracking. You need a GitHub account to comment — which if you’re reading this blog, you probably already have. As a side benefit, the need to have a github account hopefully acts as a quite effective spam filter. Spam comments have been a real issue previously.
The source lives on GitHub and every push to the main branch automatically builds and
deploys the site. Writing a new post is just creating a Markdown file and running
git push.
Rethinking the toolchain#
The blog rewrite is part of a broader effort to rethink the tools I use and how I work. The common thread: move away from GUIs and proprietary binary formats, toward codebases and open text formats that play well with version control — and increasingly, with AI tools. The blog rewrite was 95% Claude Code, currently my favourite of the AI tools I’ve tried.
Eagle to KiCad#
A significant toolchain change on the hardware side is moving from Eagle to KiCad. I used Eagle for years and it served me well. And since I’m using Fusion 360 for my mechanical designs and pay for a Fusion subscription anyways, the new Autodesk licensing changes are not impacting me directly. But Fusion is not where the hobbyist crowd hangs out nowadays. And the move from Eagle to Fusion is not entirely self-explanatory either. I have never made that transition but rather stuck with long-outdated Eagle 7 until now. Since I have to make an effort to learn a new tool anyways, I evaluated the 2026 landscape more carefully and ended up with KiCad.
First of all, it’s usually a good idea to use what other hobbyists use and today that’s KiCad. It’s open source, actively developed, and stores everything in human-readable text formats. A schematic or PCB layout is a text file. That means it can live in git, diffs are meaningful, and an AI assistant can actually read and reason about the design.
What’s next#
The workshop projects haven’t stopped — they’ve just been undocumented here. The day to day stuff is on Zerspanungsbude — a German forum, roughly the equivalent of practicalmachinist.com. As that indicates, most of my more recent projects have been precision mechanics rather than electronics, so expect to see more of that here in the future. That said, my more recent experiments with those increasingly capable AI tools have really motivated me to do more electronics again. I love designing electronics. And I also like writing code. But developing and maintaining a large base of embedded C code is extremely time consuming and sometimes tedious and repetitive. Or at least it has been. If I can outsource some of that work to, say, Claude Code that would change things a lot for me. Expect a mix of electronics and mechanics going forward.