Leveling Up My Home Lab Backup with Restic
How I migrated from a custom rsync-based sync to a proper restic backup setup that follows the 3-2-1 rule - and the NixOS module I had to write myself.
Read full post →
Benedikt Ritter
Developer productivity consultant specializing in Gradle and NixOS. Apache Software Foundation member, GradleX founder, and co-founder of TestLens.
04/01/26
gh-get v2.2.0 Released
gh-get v2.2.0 adds real-time clone progress, accepts any GitHub URL, and introduces a --fork flag.
Read full post →03/30/26
Packaging a Custom OpenTofu Provider with Nix
How to build and use a fork of an OpenTofu provider in a Nix devShell using mkProvider and withPlugins, scoped to a project, reproducible, and easy to throw away.
Read full post →03/26/26
Redesigning britter.dev
How I went from a generic Astro community template to a custom design system - with a detour through Google Stitch and two days of iterating with Claude.
Read full post →03/23/26
Declarative tmuxinator Projects with Home Manager
How I wrote a custom Home Manager module to manage tmuxinator projects declaratively - and why I've decided to contribute it upstream.
Read full post →03/20/26
Packaging kotlin-lsp for NixVim (Part 2)
How a version bump exposed native library dependencies in kotlin-lsp and what it takes to package them on NixOS
Read full post →12/01/25
Advent of Donations
I've decided to donate to open source projects for each day of December 2025 until Christmas. This blog post lists the projects donated to.
Read full post →11/15/25
Packaging kotlin-lsp for NixVim
A short how-to explaining how to package the kotlin-lsp language server with Nix in order to use it with NixVim
Read full post →10/26/25
Why Agentic AI Tools Struggle with Maven’s Lifecycle Model
Agentic AI tools often struggle with Apache Maven because its unique lifecycle model clashes with AI’s preference for minimal, incremental work, leading to false negatives and false positives. DAG-based build systems like Gradle align better, ensuring reliable incremental builds and clearer CLI behavior for both AI and humans.
Read full post →07/22/25
Optimizing Gradle Builds with Dockerized Databases, Flyway, and jOOQ
How using a custom Gradle build service and rethinking task dependencies led to faster, cleaner builds in a Java backend project using Docker, Flyway, and jOOQ.
Read full post →