Hi, I'm Bert.

I write software and create scalable systems. I make beautiful and weird things, preferably so in Rust. I work in DevOps. Sometimes I write articles and do math.

Latest posts

Deleting emails will not save the planet

A while ago I saw a post on LinkedIn that piqued my interest, not because it was any good, but because it was impressively wrong. It claimed that, to quote, “if every email user deleted just 10 emails, it would save enough electricity to power millions of households each year”. This is not only wrong, it is obviously wrong. In this post, I’d like to dive into why it’s wrong, how one might come to think it’s right, and perhaps what better message you could put out there to save the planet.

Advent of Code 2023: Let it snow

For the ninth December in a row, I’m playing with Advent of Code. Advent of Code is a series of 50 puzzles published by Eric Wastl, where you try to solve Christmas from some far-fetched horror. Every day from December 1st to December 25th, two puzzles become available, but the second is revealed only after you provide the answer to the first. In this post I will go over how you can solve them, and hopefully some interesting concepts along the way.

How to host a static Next.JS website with Nginx

Next.JS is a fairly nice way of building a multi-page, mostly statically rendered website with React and making it make sense. It actually solves the problem of “what if a React app was not a Single Page Application” pretty well, but it’s somewhat particular about how it wants to be deployed.