Michael Aufreiter

Last year I wrote in detail about the state of web-based rich text editing. Not much has changed since. It’s still way too hard to create a custom rich text editing experience for the web and I still recommend using ProseMirror if what you need is essentially a classic document editor (think Microso…

Let’s assume we want to develop a web app called Blog. With Blog people are able to write and publish blog posts in a visual editor. We want to make this app available to everyone, not just software people who know how to use Git, SQL databases, and deploy to a web server. In other words: How can we…

An old friend contacted me the other day. They have a new client project, and their goal is to improve the entire process of publishing reports in a big institution. Knowing that I worked in scientific publishing for many years he asked me: “What is it that typically goes wrong?” If I had to answer …

Usually people book me to help them with starting a new software project. They’ll tell me roughly what they want, and then they ask me what it’ll cost. But heck, how should I know? How can I predict the exact outcome of a project with very little information at the very beginning of it? Well in the …

I had a really enjoyable exchange with Anthony Hobday, diving into visual design. This text is my attempt to distill our 3 hours of talking into a few key takeaways. I loved this conversation because we went meta a couple of times, digging into the philosophy of good visual design. We explored how v…

Since 2011 I’ve been spending a great junk of my time taming web browsers to behave correctly and predictably when editing rich text. If you’ve ever tried to include a custom rich text editor in your web application, you know it’s a rather difficult problem to solve. I’d even predict that you’ll mos…

To me, minimalism in software development is not just a desirable design goal but a survival strategy. I’ve seen too many projects fail, many I’ve been involved in myself, due to an explosion of features and a complex technical foundation that stands on shaky ground but was just too tempting to star…

For the past two years building Ken, I’ve been most worried about whether there is a real need for what I’m doing. Maybe it’s just what I need, while nobody else cares? A couple of weeks ago, I made a discovery that left me with a mix of excitement and discomfort — I’m not alone in this. Nicheless i…

For many years I worked with Open Access journals, helping them to improve scientific publishing. I came to the following conclusion: In its essence, scientific discovery is not made by a university or a publisher but by a network of individuals working together. The scientists in the lab, the journ…

“Every curious mind is a scientist.” If I read that statement, I’m conflicted. One part of me is alerted. If just anyone could call themself a scientist, people would come up with “woo-woo theories” that promote what’s in their interest. Dangerous! The other part of me is open to that idea. Do I nee…

“Where people leave an expression, not an impression.” That is how I want users to think of Ken. It leaves me with a challenge: I am not searching for many but the right people to join Ken in its early days. Who are the right people? People who want to share their minds with no agenda. I can only sp…

I’d like to share my experience with sharing my own stories on Ken. I hope you’ll find it helpful and inspiring. To find a new topic I usually take a couple of minutes to become aware of a question that’s been on my mind lately. Then I pick the question I’m most curious about. Sometimes not a questi…

I joined Twitter in 2007. And I loved it. At that time there were around 5,000 tweets a day. On the entire platform! I followed a bunch of nerds that had more interesting things to say than my university professors. Back then, my Twitter timeline was easy to consume. There were about 5-20 new Tweets…

I learned to mix the old school way. As soon as I could afford it, I bought two Technics 1210 turntables and the Pioneer DJM 500 mixer. That’s been my setup since the early 2000s. I gave DJ software a try several times, but was never happy. I was frustrated with the crappy UX, and it wasn’t fun to c…

A couple of weeks ago I talked with Valentin, who is supporting me while developing the next version of my writing platform. He asked me: “How do you measure success for Ken?” An excellent question, and one I’ve been pondering about in the past few weeks. While doing so, a more fundamental question …

There’s always something on my mind. A question about life, an idea or a decision that is due. Lots of thoughts come with it. They are blurry, and they often confuse me. Writing things down, like I do right now, helps me seeing what’s beyond the clouds in my head. It forces me to articulate my thoug…

When I talked with Marius a few days ago, he told me that he wouldn’t trust any platform to host his writing. Because he could never be sure that they didn’t change their terms one day, affecting his work. I definitely share this desire, which to me boils down to these points: What I publish must be…

Is there free will? This is a question that philosophers have been asking for thousands of years and that remains unsolved. In this text I’d like to document a thought experiment of mine: Assuming it is true that I don’t have free will, what am I left with? To this point freedom has been a great val…

I’m more the visual type of guy. When it comes to deploying my app to the cloud, I prefer to “see” what’s happening. I want to change a setting, hit a button and see the changes be applied in seconds. But I know there are other types of engineers (one is sitting across from me in my office), who’d n…

For illustration, let’s assume there’s a pandemic of a new contagious disease, called Superflu. I love the peanut butter analogy from Sam Harris’ podcast episode “What we have learned from the pandemic?” It helps me to take out the emotions I have towards needles and drugs. Let’s assume this: A big …

In mid 2020 I started pursuing a dream project of mine. I’ve always been fascinated by knowledge transfer through good writing. I’ve worked in academia for about a decade, but I was frustrated with how slow and bureaucratic the publishing process there was. As a small team we built Ken, an exchange …

All online articles are opinions. Whether they are aware of it or not, authors present their view of a subject. Yet often they are trying to sell it as a truth, unconsciously. I’m guilty of having done that myself, many times. But who am I to claim a universal truth from my observations? And no, cit…

Du hast eine vielversprechende Idee für ein Online-Business und möchtest schnell heraus finden, ob sie auch in der Praxis etwas taugt? Ich kann dir dabei helfen. Ich bin Michael, 37. Seit ich 15 bin entwickle ich Webseiten. Genauer gesagt komplette Online-Plattformen mit Datenbank und allem was sons…