b3nnu3
- updated
- 2026-09-20
Moin, I’m b3nnu3.
software_developer
Software developer since 2009. I have done enough different things in that time that writing them down started to seem like the point, which is what blackbirb.dev is for.
work
- since
- 2009
- doing
- web · ecommerce · frontend platform
- editor
- IntelliJ, devoutly
- desktop
- linux, arch since 2015
The Ark
Ausbildung as Fachinformatiker Systemintegration, starting 2007. The web happened by accident during a Praktikum: I edited pages and shops, changed something small, and watched more of the products sell. That turned out to be a strange thing to find thrilling, and I have not really stopped.
web-netz from 2010, where the job was everything. Nearly every German PHP shop system, and Magento. Server management, PHP in the back, jQuery and MooTools in the front, and Internet Explorer 6 support — a sentence that still makes people flinch at the right kind of party. No Studium, no bootcamp. I learned it by having to.
Later there were bigger builds on AWS and Azure, and they taught me the thing I now say too often: most customers do not need the overhead. A shop serving a few thousand people a day does not need a control plane. It needs somebody who cares what the page weighs.
What I got wrong
For years I started new frameworks and new languages without reading the documentation. Why read the docs when ten hours of coding can solve a ten-minute problem? I can recommend those ten hours as a way to learn a language. I cannot recommend them as a way to finish a ticket.
The other one took until 2015. Windows first, then a few years on a Mac, then a long tour of Linux distributions — and every one of them broke on a major update. Arch on every machine since, because a rolling release breaks a little on a Tuesday instead of breaking everything at once in April.
How I work
IntelliJ, for an unromantic reason: it was the first editor that did not fall over inside a Magento codebase. Everything since has just worked, and I have never found a good argument to change that.
The one thing I will not do, however nicely it is asked: dark patterns. No interface built to walk somebody into a decision they did not come to make — no manufactured scarcity, no confirmshaming, no checkbox that means the opposite of what it says. If the thing needs a trick to sell, the trick is not the part that needs work.
- Ausbilderschein
- Systemintegration and Anwendungsentwicklung
- through their finals
- about a dozen Azubis
- at work
- onboarding, juniors, mid-levels
Ask me for the one piece of advice beginners always get wrong and I will disappoint you. Everybody makes their own experiences. My job is not to spare somebody the ten hours — it is to be there when they come out the other side and want to know what just happened to them.
on the machines that writeS (AI-stuff)
I treat it like a colleague, or like an Azubi who reads very fast and knows a great deal: worth delegating to, worth trusting with real work, and never shipped unread.
The setup is most of the job. Linting, tests and a project structure that exist before the first prompt, so there is something for the work to be wrong against. Then you check it, the same way you would check anyone’s.
And do not be a meat proxy. If a tool did the work, say that it did.
@home
Two male cats and an Old English Bulldog, who is the only girl in the arrangement. They have organised themselves into a triangle: the big cat annoys the dog, the dog annoys the small cat, and the small cat annoys the big cat. It closes. Nobody tries to open it.
Then there are the crows. Before we had the dog, we watched neighbours get dive-bombed on their own front path — crows remember a face, and they hold it against you. So when the dog arrived, I started feeding them instead. That was five years ago. Now they sit on the balcony like they pay rent, and they come along on walks: up the street, roof to roof, escorting a bulldog who has never once noticed them.
The site’s name is not from them, in case that dot looked connectable. I just like crows — the derpy ones especially, and a sufficiently derpy bird is not a bird, it is a birb. Black bird, derpy: blackbirb.
Current SideQuest
September 2026. Finishing the bot. The next helpdotexe event is at the end of October, and that is the kind of deadline that does not move, so everything else is waiting its turn.
find me
- fedi
- @b3nnu3@blackbirb.dev
- forge
- codeberg.org/b3nnu3
- github
- github.com/b3nnu3
- cats
- on request
add me to your project
ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIMVxUlDmvrTev+9+XCkARbEzBq6yD7d0Oh0e7FB5M4uQ b3nnu3@b3nnu3.dev