The Quintessence of 2
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Felix Schneider
23 posts by Felix Schneider
How to fully autogenerate Starlight sidebars (without losing control)
Have you ever wanted to simplify sidebar generation in your Starlight project? Have you tried autogenerating the entire sidebar only to find it doesn’t let you customise the structure to your needs?
This post demonstrates two Starlight features that make fully autogenerated sidebars flexible and reduce maintenance.
Stop Outsourcing Your Soul to AI
It has been more than two and a half years since the release of ChatGPT. The 30th November, 2022 marked the beginning of a new era. The start of AI. Nowadays, many professions and people in private lives, especially in the information technology sector, use it on a daily basis. And we do not even know where we are on the Gartner hype cycle or if AI will improve following Kurzweil’s “Law of Accelerating Returns”.
The trend is still rising, but at the same time I have noticed a slight but steady degradation of knowledge on a human basis because people delegate more and more creative work to AI. As a result, I have decided to write a little blog post, where I can share my thoughts, trying to discourage the overuse of Artificial Intelligence which would ruin our cognitive capabilities. And although I know that very little people read this, it does not stop me from trying. Otherwise, I might have missed my opportunity in helping humanities future.
Vibe-coding a VS Code Extension for Terraform projects
Today, I want to talk about a small VS Code extension that I vibe-coded in a single day to make working with Terraform easier. I will first explain what Terraform is, and then jump right into the functionality and reasons behind this extension. Feel free to skip the first section if you are already familiar with Terraform.
Earworms and the message hidden within the pattern
Yes, this title is a small nod to the excellent Netflix series “Arcane”, but that’s not what this post is about.
Today, I want to share some thoughts about earworms, a term that originated in German (“Ohrwurm”) and was later adopted into English as a literal translation. The meaning behind this rather abstract term is catchy tunes—sticky music, as Wikipedia calls it. This phenomenon often occurs unpredictably, especially when our thoughts drift away from the present moment.
How to create a Rehype plugin that turns GitHub links into beautiful badges
Discover how a tiny Rehype plugin can give your GitHub links a big visual upgrade. With just a few lines of code, we’ll turn regular profile links into elegant badges with avatars, inspired by Antfu’s site and powered by Astro + Starlight.
Accelerating translations with continuous integration
I have been working in OSS on 
GitHub for over a year now and although I thought I found everything I want to contribute to, I recently discovered 
Peli’s personal project action-continuous-translation and I am very happy that I started doing regular contributions there and being part of the little community now.
Some aspects of creating a blog are really easy, and some are extremely difficult!
Talk a little bit about how one can become better (not master by any means, nobody is perfect) in writing a blog post. These are just my thoughts after two awesome guys from the Astro Community (
Jacob and 
Lou) decided to write blogs about how hard and easy it is to write blog posts.
Please read their posts first as this is the follow-up on both of them:
- “Why is writing blog posts so hard?” - Jacob Jenkins
- “Why Writing Blogs isn’t hard” - Louis Escher
- “Some aspects of creating a blog are really easy, and some are extremely difficult!” - Felix Schneider
After that you have successfully completed this awesome trilogy of blog posts about blog posts.
How to create a horizontal progress indicator for your Starlight site
Learn how to create a horizontal progress indicator for your 
Starlight site.
How components open up endless possibilities
Combine two Starlight Sidebar Topics plugins to show a list of topics on desktop and a dropdown menu in the mobile sidebar.
A short history of Starlight Sidebar Topics plugins
Felix Schneider
trueberryless
Artificial Intelligence
Written with the help of AI
In this post, I’ll show you the evolution of Starlight plugins with a case study of the Starlight Sidebar Topics plugin. Be prepared to find out some impressive facts about people and code around Starlight.
How to make your Starlight sidebar items look better
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at how small changes can make a big difference when it comes to whitespaces in your Starlight sidebar.
From Balloons to Binary: A 20th Birthday Packed with Clues
Felix Schneider
trueberryless
Artificial Intelligence
Written with the help of AI
This year, I turned 20 - and instead of simply lighting candles and inflating balloons, I wanted to celebrate in a more creative and personal way. The idea? Hide the number 20 in as many surprising, clever, and hidden forms as possible throughout a decorated living room - then capture it all in a single photo. Whether through mathematical puzzles or visual Easter eggs, the room transformed into a joyful riddle full of playful detail.
Designing a Profile That Works Within GitHub's Rules
Every great project starts with a realization of a problem. My GitHub profile README was cluttered, filled with too much information, too many badges, and an overwhelming amount of content that lacked style and structure. It had hackathon achievements, GitHub contribution graphs, various technical badges, and much more, making it visually unappealing and difficult to navigate. Initially, I thought this was an effective way to present myself, but over time, it became clear that the information was overwhelming rather than informative. I wanted something new, a more refined and visually appealing approach to presenting my profile, and the idea of implementing a bento grid came to mind. The goal was to create a layout that was not only functional but also aesthetically impressive and structured.
How I Built a GitHub Profile README That Shouldn't Exist (But It Does)
Felix Schneider
trueberryless
Artificial Intelligence
Written with the help of AI
Creating a standout GitHub profile README isn’t just about adding a few badges — it’s about pushing technical boundaries. In this deep dive, I explore low-level SVG manipulation, HTML-to-SVG conversion, inline animations, and full automation with GitHub Actions to build what I believe is one of the most technically advanced GitHub READMEs. From a dynamic Bento Grid that updates every 5 minutes to embedding live SVGs without external requests, this project transformed my profile into a living, self-updating showcase of my work. Want to know how I did it? Let’s break it down. 🚀
The tale of trueberryless
This is the story of how I came up with the wonderful but meaningless username “trueberryless”.
A Stylish Way to Give Credit in Starlight Projects
Starlight Cooler Credit is a customizable plugin that gives stylish, multilingual credit links to Starlight, Astro, and the Starlight Blog—turning a small idea into a global collaboration.
Setting up Continuous deployment in a GitHub repository
Today we’ll take a look at how to set up a GitHub repository which will be deployed to a k3s cluster via Argo CD. In summary, the article will include Workflow files, Dockerfile, manifests (deployment) and 
Docker Hub repositories. Please check out our Argo CD blog because this will be a continuation of the other post.
Setting up Argo CD in a k3s cluster
Continuing to improve our k3s cluster and especially the CI/CD workflow, we now take a look at the GitOps tool called 
Argo CD, and how we can integrate it into our cluster. Our tech stack for deployment uses these services: k3s, Helm, Cilium & after this tutorial Argo CD as well
Designing a No-Account, No-Database Approach to Time Tracking
True Tracker is a minimalist time-tracking app built with Next.js that keeps all data in your browser — no accounts, no database, just complete privacy and simplicity.
Setting up Kubernetes with Cilium and Cloudflare
This blog posts describes the process of setting up a 
Kubernetes cluster with 
k3s and 
Cilium. We use 
Helm as the package manager and 
Cloudflare as the certificate issuer. We used the tips and tricks from Vegard S. Hagen from his article. Essentially, this blog explains, how all the trueberryless.org websites are deployed (not any more).
Designing a Kafka-Based Pipeline and Interactive Graph for Energy Anomaly Detection
For our diploma thesis with Siemens AG, we built a service-oriented solution to detect power grid anomalies — featuring a Kafka pipeline, PostgreSQL, GraphQL API, and an Angular dashboard with tables and an interactive graph for real-time visualisation.
Organising School Life: The Journey Behind Mutanuq
Mutanuq is a fast, Markdown-powered website I built to organize school content, streamline studying, and create a reliable resource for classmates and myself.