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Nicolas Fränkel is a technologist focusing on cloud-native technologies, DevOps, CI/CD pipelines, and system observability. His focus revolves around creating technical content, delivering talks, and engaging with developer communities to promote the adoption of modern software practices. With a strong background in software, he has worked extensively with the JVM, applying his expertise across various industries. In addition to his technical work, he is the author of several books and regularly shares insights through his blog and open-source contributions.
- From Google Drive to Syncthing over Tailscale (2026-11-01)
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I used Dropbox for decades, then switched to Google Drive. Both worked for most of my files. One file never fit, though: my KeePass password database. It’s the file I need on every device and the file I want to keep private the most. After one annoyance too many, I moved it to Syncthing over Tailscale. The rest stays on Google Drive, for now. This post describes why and how. The file that made me care My password manager is KeePass-based.[…]
- Security Baked Into the JVM: DirtyChai scales vertically, JGDMS scales horizontally (2026-10-25)
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Nobody runs a SecurityManager in production. The usual reason given is that it does not survive a load test, and every guarantee in this series was bought with a check: a constraint on each call, an audit before each load, a principal set on each thread, a digest on each grant. Part 1 declared constraints on a remote call. Part 2 vetted code before a client loaded it. Part 3 and Part 4 established who is calling and carried that chain across the wire.[…]
- Maps without a tile server (2026-10-18)
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If you have built an application with an interactive map, you know what you are in for. You pick a tile provider such as Google or Mapbox, or a self-hosted stack like GeoServer or Martin, and your frontend requests thousands of small image or vector tiles as the user interacts with the map. A server processes each request: it reads from a database, renders the tile, maybe caches it, and sends it back. That server is infrastructure: it needs to be deployed, monitored, and scaled.[…]
- Coding assistants: a journey from a convert @ Porto Tech Hub
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For a long time, I was advert to coding assistants. I didn’t see any benefit: it was faster for me to write code, than to let them generate crap, and fix it afterwards. Then, around summer 2025, something changed. At home, I used Claude Code for better and better results. At work, GitHub Copilot was not as good, but it was still producing acceptable results. I’m now at a point where I can’t imagine not having coding assistants. I’m hooked. I have "vibe-coded" (I hate the term) a few personal projects: a Kotlin multi-platform project to cross-post content across multiple social media sites, a Python project for an artsy project, and a command-line to report content on Twitter. By the time I actually do the talk, the list will probably be even longer. In this session, I’d like to share how I use coding assistants. Since the landscape is changing all the time, I hope this session will be interactive and that you’ll share as well.
- Practical introduction to OpenTelemetry tracing @ KCD Suisse Romande
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Tracking a request’s flow across different components in distributed systems is essential. With the rise of microservices, their importance has risen to critical levels. Some proprietary tools for tracking have been used already: Jaeger and Zipkin naturally come to mind. Observability is built on three pillars: logging, metrics, and tracing. OpenTelemetry is a joint effort to bring an open standard to them. Jaeger and Zipkin joined the effort so that they are now OpenTelemetry compatible. In this talk, I’ll describe the above in more detail and showcase a (simple) use case to demo how you could benefit from OpenTelemetry in your distributed architecture.
