This was a quiet week for the freistil team, with lots of work happening behind the scenes. While Markus started building new servers and benchmarking different storage setups for our future database clusters, I spent most of my time working on the freistilbox Dashboard.

My current focus with regard to the dashboard is the “User-Centric World” milestone in our Gitlab repository. You see, when I started building the dashboard years ago, I based its data model very much on the existing data in our infrastructure automation system, a data set that wasn’t designed with a web application in mind. Over time, the lack of proper schema design became more and more apparent, and my goal with “user-centric world” is to remedy this issue. For example, the rigid association of a user to a single company makes it impossible to give members of a web agency access to a freistilbox cluster owned by their client. Since we work mostly with web agencies, cross-company access to website details is a necessary feature, and most of my coding time these days goes into restructuring the data model to make it possible.

With Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) rules coming into effect this weekend, I had to shift my focus temporarily to the necessary modifications in our credit card billing processes. Fortunately, having built them on Stripe greatly simplified these changes.

By the way, if you’d like to catch a glimpse in my software engineering work, you can because I often broadcast it live on the streaming platform Twitch. Feel free to follow my channel Full Stack Live and drop by now and again! Sharing our DevOps expertise with other developers has become another way in which we live our business core values of transparency and community.

Finally, Friday the 13th went by without any issues, so have a great weekend!