Posts on Martin Fischer

Hängemenge

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For my second last birthday my friends got me a hammock and it’s one of the best gifts I’ve gotten, I love it. I even named my laptop hamac¹. A person close to me coined the word Hängemenge, inspired by how Kugelmugel sounds. Hängemenge describes the feeling of lying in a hammock or it could refer to a multitude of hammocks. For some time now I’ve been meaning to design a font (or rather typeface, as I’ve learned²), where the horizontal bars in H and A hang like a hammock. Well I finally did it!

NixOS and what I've been serving

Thu, 01 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

After 5 years on Debian, I switched to NixOS at the end of last year. In this blog post I’ll confess to neglecting my server, reflect on why I didn’t get Nix when I looked at it a couple years ago and plug the services I’ve been running for the past years, that I’ve now nixified.

I taught myself programming, I then studied computer science and now for almost 1.5 years I have been working in a small team at a big company. At work we have a team for operations. Over the years I have very much grown as a developer but I have not been much of an operator. I have just been chucking service after service on my VPS by manually editing files via SSH (mostly Nginx configs, systemd units and crontab files). I also never figured out deployment. I love Git, so I set up a post-receive Git hook on the server to restart the systemd service but this was never a solid solution. I only ever touched my server to add another service and over time I lost track of what I was even running.

Welcome back

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I published my last blog post almost 3 years ago. In that time much has happened. I made new friends, I lost friends, I tried therapy, I discovered volleyball, I cycled through Europe for a month, I got my BSc. I finally moved out from a living situation that wasn’t good for me and got my first job.

My friends, sports, music and my mum have gotten me this far. I’m excited for the future and will hopefully manage to publish some of the stuff I’ve been working on.

Error handling in Rust web frameworks

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The two most popular Rust web frameworks, Rocket and Actix Web both let you define request handlers like the following:

#[post("/echo", data="<msg>")]
fn echo(msg: Json<Message>) -> String {
    msg.text
}

Notice how the parameter is automatically derived from the request: we just declare the parameter and the framework takes care of passing the argument. In the above example the framework will parse the request body as JSON and pass the deserialized Message struct. How does this work?

Tracking .git/config files centrally with git

Thu, 08 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

How do you start working on a remote git repository? You clone it from an URL with git clone <url>. Great! Now let’s say a month later you want to clone the same repository on a different machine. What was the URL again?

Over the years I have amassed so many git repositories with varying upstream servers that this has become a regular struggle for me. To make things worse I also use different git identities (name and email) for work and hobby projects. So after I have somehow acquired the URL I also need to remember to set up the right git identity.

Building a blog with make, pandoc and Python

Tue, 06 Oct 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I have been wanting to create a personal website for a long time, but now I have finally figured out a domain name and toolchain that I am happy with.

There are many static-site generators out there but the ones I tried were too complex for my taste. The features that I wanted were just:

convert Markdown to HTML
wrap the resulting HTML in a template with some variables from a YAML frontmatter
autogenerate a list of all posts on the startpage
autogenerate an Atom feed with my latest posts so that people can subscribe

Two powerful hammers #

The answer to the question “How do I convert A to B?” is pandoc. Pandoc also supports YAML frontmatter and templates, so we have got the first two points covered.