About this site - Welcome visitor 👋
Welcome to ByteVagabond.com, where I share experiments in code, life, and everything in between. For more about me, visit heichling.xyz. Happy exploring!
ByteVagabond – Digital Tinkering & Real-World Adventures
Featured Posts
Technical projects, experiments, travel stories and practical lessons from building things.
I Analyzed 70 Startups' Codebases — The Ones With More Technical Debt Raised More Money
My study of 70 venture-backed startups found shipping speed was more closely tied to funding success than clean code during the ZIRP era.Building Enterprise AI: Hard-Won Lessons from 1200+ Hours of RAG Development
Lessons from 1,200+ hours building enterprise RAG, covering document ingestion, contextual chunking, hybrid search and hierarchical retrieval.Building a social media startup
What building bonq taught me about user testing, cross-platform architecture, pitching, co-founders and spending as much time marketing as coding.Going fully remote - maximum freedom
How I crossed Southeast Asia at 19 on a motorbike with a homemade sleeping sidecar, solar power, cooking gear, and water and fuel tanks.
Recent Posts
Technical projects, experiments, travel stories and practical lessons from building things.
Reactive Data Sync: Mastering Concurrent Updates in Large-Scale Applications
How I kept PouchDB and an optimistic client store in sync under heavy writes using queues, retries, conflict merging and rollback.Web UI Magic: Reactivity Fundamentals and Angular Best Practices
How the DOM and event loop underpin reactivity, how major JavaScript frameworks update interfaces, and how to speed up Angular apps.Calisthenics Workout Plan
My four-to-six-day calisthenics plan covers push, pull, legs and abs, with sets, reps, a full-body option and skill progressions.Bet on the Web - Why the future of applications is web based
I make the case for web apps as the default, based on richer browser APIs and cross-platform reach, while confronting browser monopolies.Self-Sufficient Gardening & Permaculture 101
A practical beginner's guide to self-sufficient gardening, covering seed timing, soil care, natural fertilizers, preservation and crop calendars.Why I Deleted WhatsApp and What I've Gained From Living Without It for 5 Years
Why I left WhatsApp for Signal, what five years without it did for my privacy and focus, and the trade-offs when friends and family stay behind.Reverse engineering and creation of a temperature monitoring app
How I reverse-engineered incomplete Chinese BLE specs and built a cross-platform medical temperature monitoring app in six weeks.Goodbye, Ticket Monopolists: How a Decentralized Ticketing Platform can change the Game
How an NFT ticketing proof of concept uses IOTA Shimmer, OrbitDB, NestJS and Angular to create, buy and securely redeem tickets.A fully decentralised, easy accessible app
How a browser-based, censorship-resistant app could use IPFS, OrbitDB, Tor and decentralized identity to work without central servers.Food for thought
A collection of quotes from Shoshana Zuboff, Jeremy Rifkin, Edward Snowden and Sacha Baron Cohen on surveillance, democracy and social media.Offline-First Cross-Platform with Ionic and CouchDB
Build one Ionic and Angular app for web, iOS and Android, with PWA installation, PouchDB and CouchDB sync, authentication and offline access.Evening the playing field - A new society with Industry 4.0 and IOTA
How IOTA's feeless distributed ledger could support machine-to-machine payments, data exchange and decentralized Industry 4.0 systems.The homeserver saga - Part 2
How I built an energy-efficient NanoPi M4 NAS with OpenMediaVault, Docker, MariaDB, Nextcloud, DuckDNS, HTTPS and temperature-based fan control.Corebooted Thinkpad x230 with hardware mods
How I upgraded a €97 ThinkPad X230 with Coreboot, a classic X220 keyboard, custom boot art, an Atheros Wi-Fi card and an IPS display.The Homeserver saga - Part 1
How I turned an old Ubuntu laptop into a Nextcloud homeserver with Wake-on-LAN, OpenWrt port forwarding and Docker containers.
