Notes on engineering, applied AI, leadership and the occasional detour into writing fiction.https://christianriesen.com/enhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/spec-driven-agentic-development/https://christianriesen.com/posts/spec-driven-agentic-development/The one trick almost nobody uses: tell the LLM to ask you the questions. A working method for turning a braindump into a spec precise enough that an agent can build from it — and keeping the spec as the source of truth afterwards.Wed, 12 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTAIAISpecsAgentic developmentClaude Codehttps://christianriesen.com/posts/configure-default-datetime-format-of-symfony/https://christianriesen.com/posts/configure-default-datetime-format-of-symfony/The Symfony Serializer happily normalizes DateTimes — until you need milliseconds. How to change the DateTimeNormalizer default format once, globally.Thu, 12 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/add-disks-to-a-setup-with-a-luks-container-on-a/https://christianriesen.com/posts/add-disks-to-a-setup-with-a-luks-container-on-a/Growing an encrypted LUKS-on-LVM data partition onto freshly bought disks without losing a byte — the exact command sequence, plus the obligatory backup sermon.Fri, 30 Mar 2018 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/auto-deploy-a-sculpin-website-for-free/https://christianriesen.com/posts/auto-deploy-a-sculpin-website-for-free/Public repo on GitHub, merge to master, site live on S3 — a zero-cost Travis auto-deploy for a Sculpin static site, as used for rokka.io.Fri, 25 Nov 2016 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringsculpinAWSdeploymenthttps://christianriesen.com/posts/how-to-nanowrimo/https://christianriesen.com/posts/how-to-nanowrimo/The system that carried me through NaNoWriMo wins: plain text files, automatic backups, no backspace key, and a merciless focus on reaching the end of the story.Mon, 31 Oct 2016 00:00:00 GMTWritingnanowrimohttps://christianriesen.com/posts/symfony-25-using-a-new-structure/https://christianriesen.com/posts/symfony-25-using-a-new-structure/Saying yes to the new 3.0 directory structure in a fresh Symfony 2.5 project: what moves where, and why var and bin make daily life easier.Sun, 08 Jun 2014 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringsymfony2https://christianriesen.com/posts/alternative-location-of-the-symfony2-documentation/https://christianriesen.com/posts/alternative-location-of-the-symfony2-documentation/When symfony.com goes down mid-task, the entire documentation is still sitting in a GitHub repo — less pretty to navigate, but all there.Wed, 13 Feb 2013 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringdocumentationsymfony2https://christianriesen.com/posts/one-time-passwords-in-php-and-google-authenticator/https://christianriesen.com/posts/one-time-passwords-in-php-and-google-authenticator/Two-factor auth for your own app with Google Authenticator: how the one-time-password RFCs work, and the PHP library I published to handle the tricky bits.Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringOTPOne Time PasswordGoogle AuthenticatorPHPhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/zend-certified-engineer-php-53/https://christianriesen.com/posts/zend-certified-engineer-php-53/After years of owning the study guide, I finally sat the ZCE PHP 5.3 exam — number 95 in Switzerland, with honest notes on the test's fuzzier questions.Sat, 16 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/extension-pathscriptphp-not-present/https://christianriesen.com/posts/extension-pathscriptphp-not-present/A PHP script that ran fine by hand but failed in cron with a nonsense error — the culprit was DOS line endings, and dos2unix ended it.Fri, 24 Feb 2012 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/writing-is-the-smallest-part-in-writing/https://christianriesen.com/posts/writing-is-the-smallest-part-in-writing/Sanderson-scale word counts make the point: typing the words is the smallest part of writing a novel — the process around them is the real job.Mon, 02 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMTWritingWritinghttps://christianriesen.com/posts/the-qupid-principle/https://christianriesen.com/posts/the-qupid-principle/Quality, Performance, Design — pronounced like cupid — a three-question filter for choosing frying pans, software and pretty much everything else.Fri, 30 Dec 2011 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/testing-usb-drive-capacity/https://christianriesen.com/posts/testing-usb-drive-capacity/Cheap USB sticks that report 16 GB and silently eat your files — how the controller lie works, and how to test a drive before trusting it.Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringUSB Driveshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/disappointing-endings-in-video-games/https://christianriesen.com/posts/disappointing-endings-in-video-games/Finishing Arcania: Gothic 4 left me cold, and it is not alone — a long, spoiler-heavy look at why games keep fumbling the one part you remember: the ending.Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMTWritingGamesWritingEndingshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/flattr-statistics-of-september-2010/https://christianriesen.com/posts/flattr-statistics-of-september-2010/Four more months of Flattr numbers, from three-dollar summers to a single click worth 30 cents — small data on whether micro-donations add up.Fri, 01 Oct 2010 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringFlattrstatisticshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/ms-sql-blob-truncated/https://christianriesen.com/posts/ms-sql-blob-truncated/JPEGs stored as blobs in MS SQL came back truncated at exactly 64'512 bytes — the triple-facepalm hunt that ended in a FreeTDS config default.Mon, 12 Jul 2010 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringMSSQLFreeTDShttps://christianriesen.com/posts/flattr-statistics-of-may-2010/https://christianriesen.com/posts/flattr-statistics-of-may-2010/Full transparency on a month of micro-donations: 24 things, 66 clicks, 11.34 euros — and why more clicks did not mean more money.Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringFlattrStatisticshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/debian-killall-command/https://christianriesen.com/posts/debian-killall-command/The package name I keep forgetting: where killall actually lives on Debian, written down so I never have to look it up again.Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringDebianLinuxKillallhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/language-reversal-from-german-to-english-and-back/https://christianriesen.com/posts/language-reversal-from-german-to-english-and-back/One harmless German sentence about a bed, and everything that quietly breaks when you try to carry it into English and back again.Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:00:00 GMTWritingLanguageTranslationWritinghttps://christianriesen.com/posts/writing-as-the-main-job/https://christianriesen.com/posts/writing-as-the-main-job/Would you quit tomorrow and write full time if the money stayed the same? Reading how full-time authors actually live made me answer carefully.Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMTWritingwritinghttps://christianriesen.com/posts/comics-and-closed-lips/https://christianriesen.com/posts/comics-and-closed-lips/A pet peeve turned craft note: if a comic character is speaking, draw the mouth open — and how much a pair of lips can say about how someone talks.Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMTWritingwritingcomicshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/how-characters-look-comics-versus-books/https://christianriesen.com/posts/how-characters-look-comics-versus-books/Comics show you a face; novels hand you a description and let your head do the drawing — on the two ways a reader gets to meet a character.Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 GMTWritingwritingcomicsimaginationhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/testing-missing-translations-in-zend-framework/https://christianriesen.com/posts/testing-missing-translations-in-zend-framework/Finding untranslated strings in Zend_Translate by swapping in an adapter that answers everything with the same marker — an instant visual map of what you missed.Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPZend Frameworkhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/godaddy-ssl-certificate-and-apache/https://christianriesen.com/posts/godaddy-ssl-certificate-and-apache/Support swore the certificate was installed correctly, yet fresh browsers rejected it — a broken intermediate chain, exposed by a free online tester.Wed, 02 Dec 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringSSLApacheGoDaddyhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/simple-wget-written-in-php/https://christianriesen.com/posts/simple-wget-written-in-php/No wget, no install rights, but a working PHP — a tiny stand-in script that fetches a file from a URL when that is all you need.Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPWgetToolhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/128network-is-unreachable-connect-to-listener/https://christianriesen.com/posts/128network-is-unreachable-connect-to-listener/A cryptic Apache error filling the logs on Solaris 10, and the one-line Listen directive change that silences it for good.Thu, 15 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringApachehttps://christianriesen.com/posts/ant-and-zend-studio/https://christianriesen.com/posts/ant-and-zend-studio/Ant mysteriously disabled in Zend Studio, and the trick with a throwaway project wizard that switches it back on.Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringZend StudioAntPHPhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/making-lists-easier-and-more-beautiful/https://christianriesen.com/posts/making-lists-easier-and-more-beautiful/Building 'a, b, c' lists without dangling commas or foreach gymnastics — implode was right there all along, and it composes further than you would think.Thu, 27 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/the-coders-approach-to-writing/https://christianriesen.com/posts/the-coders-approach-to-writing/What years of wrangling structured data teach about novel writing — and why the tidy expand-from-one-sentence method rarely survives contact with a real idea.Sun, 02 Aug 2009 00:00:00 GMTWritingWritinghttps://christianriesen.com/posts/how-novels-work/https://christianriesen.com/posts/how-novels-work/At 500 words a day, a 100'000-word novel is 200 working days before editing even starts — sobering arithmetic on what a book actually costs.Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 GMTWritingWritingNovelshttps://christianriesen.com/posts/creating-a-mysql-dump-in-csv-format/https://christianriesen.com/posts/creating-a-mysql-dump-in-csv-format/mysqldump has no --csv switch, but with the right -T incantation you get clean CSV files that Excel and Calc open without complaint.Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringMySQLhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/cycling-between-strings/https://christianriesen.com/posts/cycling-between-strings/Cycling through a fixed set of values without counters, resets or static-variable hacks — a small class that keeps its own state does it better.Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/mini-caching-in-classes/https://christianriesen.com/posts/mini-caching-in-classes/A method called repeatedly, a result too expensive to recompute, and the five-line private-array cache that beats passing state around.Fri, 12 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPCachehttps://christianriesen.com/posts/2009-has-53-weeks/https://christianriesen.com/posts/2009-has-53-weeks/The cronjob was fine, the import was fine — my firm belief that a year has 52 weeks was not. A calendar surprise, and the one-line PHP fix.Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPhttps://christianriesen.com/posts/large-mysql-inserts-with-php/https://christianriesen.com/posts/large-mysql-inserts-with-php/A million rows from PHP without trashing the disk or timing out: combine the inserts and the whole job finishes in under thirty seconds.Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 GMTEngineeringPHPMySQLDatabase