Blog

Spring-less testing

Spring is a great project, it helps a lot with common, usually mundane, tasks. But it’s not always unicorns and rainbows. Too much Spring in tests can cause a few issues like long execution time and fragility. Here, I’m showing how to avoid such pitfalls.

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dprox – Declarative Reverse Proxy

Reverse proxies don’t have to be a pain when it comes to local development.

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Secure Kubernetes Cluster

Why, even with Docker and Kubernetes, there is still work to be done on security issues

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Taking Screenshots of DOM Elements

Now that PhantomJS is dead, we need an alternative. Turns out that Puppeteer, Google’s official remote-control API for Chrome, is just the ticket.

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Mundane Bash Tips

Various tips and patterns for writing shell scripts.

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Enforce strong passwords!

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Have YOU been pwned?

With the V2 release of the “pwned passwords” database came a new feature called range search, which allows to securely check passwords with only minor efforts. Here’s how to use it.

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It All Looks the Same to Me

In the previous post, pHash helped us to summarize our photo album. Now it’s time to employ BK-trees and efficiently search through the metric space of perceptual hashes. Let’s roll up the sleeves; more Rust awaits!

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The language of maths is not the language of your business

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Formatting with first-class types

Programming with stringly-typed APIs is like walking a tightrope; it’s good to have some support in case something goes wrong. Languages with first-class types offer us impressive tooling to guarantee correctness of our code. In this post, we’ll see how Idris helps us bullet-proof a printf function.

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That looks oddly familiar

Perceptual hashing is an exciting technique for processing media files and finding similar content. In this post, we combine Rust and pHash to find perceptual similarities in our photo library.

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Carbon dioxide monitoring with Rust, InfluxDB and Grafana

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Media Art Opens Up New Perspectives

The more technological developments progress, the more we use digital innovations to shape our lives. Codes and algorithms play a decisive role in determining how we use and perceive information. Media artists do not remain untouched by this phenomenon. Through their digital works of art, they take a stand on many questions facing our society. Media art reveals new perspectives, but also reminds us of the responsibility borne by technology companies and software developers.

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Supporting understanding with simplicity

Why do we even talk about simplicity? Why is it such a hot topic? Why is nobody praising complexity? Why do things like the KISS exist?

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What’s in a Name: Evaluate

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Elm in the wild: A Sandwich Delivery Game

New languages often look shiny and cool in their playground examples. But bringing them out into the wild and having to code more than just the examples in the tutorials, often reveals the true value of these new languages. So, in order to evaluate the shininess of Elm, a language compiled to JavaScript and used for building web front ends, we decided to use it for a scoped project: We programmed the Sandwich Delivery Game for the “Smart City” exhibition in Basel, Switzerland.

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ROCA-Compliant Table Sorting

The article presents an easy way to enable table column sorting without JavaScript. In addition to the avoided complexity, the solution is also compliant to ROCA.

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Remain resilient, fail fast

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Marrying Rails, Turbolinks and JavaScript Custom Elements

Rails 5.1 just arrived and brought with it a curated setup for webpack. Think what you want about webpack, but it’s the new default for JavaScript module loading and bundling in Rails and therefore here to stay. So here’s a quick post on how to get the new JavaScript goodness up and running with your existing Turbolinks setup.

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Rendering Self-Contained Custom Elements

This is a response to Paul Kinlan’s post on creating custom elements, explaining how JSX can be used for declarative templating.

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Building Component-Based Front Ends with Rails

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How Browsers Load and Process JavaScript

This is a rundown of how browsers process JavaScript references within HTML.

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The Power of the HTML Form

The HTML form is a powerful tool for telling a server what you want to do. But does everybody know how it works? With the multifarious JavaScript frameworks currently available today, software developers in the industry today often do not know how to create a web application without JavaScript. Is there an alternative? The web has been around for ages. What did people do before JavaScript?

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Simplicity - Fighting Complexity At All Costs

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FP vs. OO

I recently came across a tweet stating that there were no people who “defend OO vs. FP” that actually used FP in real projects. This is not the first time I came across statements like this (like in a blog posts portraying functional programmers as being higher on the “evolutionary ladder” than object-oriented programmers). Another claim I hear again and again is that “only Functional Programming can solve the problems of the modern age (like multi-core computing)”. I disagree with both claims.