The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Distributed systems / cloud

Christian Hollinger

chollinger.com

Software Engineering, GNU/Linux, Data, GIS, and other things I like.

Distributed systems / cloudFunctional / PL theoryDatabasesLinux / UnixEmbedded / microcontrollers

’16’17’18’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
41 from 4 Sep 2016 to 14 Jul 2026
Posting
now and then (4 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://chollinger.com/feed.xml

2026 3

  1. ZIP codes are a bad spatial abstraction
  2. Building confidence in geospatial data
  3. I used my homelab to start an LLC: Meet SkaldMaps

2025 5

  1. How I run and deploy docker services in my homelab with Komodo and a custom CLI
  2. More random home lab things I've recently learned
  3. New Website & Scala Days 2025 Announcement
  4. A Distributed System from scratch, with Scala 3 - Part 3: Job submission, worker scaling, and leader election & consensus with Raft
  5. My 2025 Homelab Updates: Quadrupling Capacity

2024 2

  1. Why I still self host my servers (and what I've recently learned)
  2. Improving my Distributed System with Scala 3: Consistency Guarantees & Background Tasks (Part 2)

2023 4

  1. Moving a Proxmox host with a SAS HBA as PCI passthrough for zfs + TrueNAS
  2. Building a functional, effectful Distributed System from scratch in Scala 3, just to avoid Leetcode (Part 1)
  3. Migrating a Home Server to Proxmox, TrueNas, and zfs, or: How to make your home network really complicated for no good reason
  4. QGIS is the mapping software you didn't know you needed

2022 4

  1. Tiny Telematics: Tracking my truck's location offline with a Raspberry Pi, redis, Kafka, and Flink (Part 2)
  2. Tiny Telematics: Tracking my truck's location offline with a Raspberry Pi, redis, Kafka, and Flink (Part 1)
  3. Functional Programming concepts I actually like: A bit of praise for Scala (for once)
  4. Scala, Spark, Books, and Functional Programming: An Essay

2021 5

  1. Building a Data Lake with Spark and Iceberg at Home to over-complicate shopping for a House
  2. Writing a Telegram Bot to control a Raspberry Pi from afar (to observe Guinea Pigs)
  3. Raspberry Pi Gardening: Monitoring a Vegetable Garden using a Raspberry Pi - Part 2: 3D Printing
  4. Raspberry Pi Gardening: Monitoring a Vegetable Garden using a Raspberry Pi - Part 1
  5. Bad Data and Data Engineering: Dissecting Google Play Music Takeout Data using Beam, go, Python, and SQL

2020 6

  1. Why I use Linux
  2. RE: Throw Away Code? Use go, not Python or Rust!
  3. A Data Engineering Perspective on Go vs. Python (Part 2 - Dataflow)
  4. A Data Engineering Perspective on Go vs. Python (Part 1)
  5. Goodbye, WordPress - Hello, Hugo & nginx
  6. How a broken memory module hid in plain sight

2019 4

  1. Tensorflow on edge, or – Building a “smart” security camera with a Raspberry Pi
  2. How I built a (tiny) real-time Telematics application on AWS
  3. A look at Apache Hadoop in 2019
  4. Building a Home Server

2018 3

  1. Analyzing Reddit’s Top Posts & Images With Google Cloud (Part 2 - AutoML)
  2. Analyzing Reddit’s Top Posts & Images With Google Cloud (Part 1)
  3. Analyzing Twitter Location Data with Heron, Machine Learning, Google's NLP, and BigQuery

2017 2

  1. Data Lakes: Some thoughts on Hadoop, Hive, HBase, and Spark
  2. (Tiny) Telematics with Spark and Zeppelin

2016 3

  1. Storm vs. Heron – Part 2 – Why Heron? A developer’s view
  2. Storm vs. Heron, Part 1: Reusing a Storm topology for Heron
  3. Update an HBase table with Hive... or sed