Oliver Eidel
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Making My Own Glasses
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12 min read
It’s a long weekend, I’m standing in my flat, 10 lenses scattered across the desk in front of me. I’m wearing weird glasses consisting of an empty plastic frame and some lenses stuck into it. I squint out of the window, trying to read number plates of cars parked in the street. What happened? It…
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Thread-safe queues in Clojure
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10 min read
Imagine the following: You have a pool of workers. Each worker should get an item from a queue and process it. Using “workers” from core.async Great! How do we launch those workers? Let’s use core.async for that, specifically go: By the way, core.async has a fixed-size thread pool of 8 workers, but that’s stuff for another post. Every time dotimes runs with…
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React less
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4 min read
Push vs. Pull notifications When my phone vibrates with a new notification, I react to it – I read it while thinking about it and sometimes type a reply. In a very broad sense, it’s a push notification: It’s pushed towards me without me seeking it and it triggers my reaction. How did people do this…
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The Correlation Project
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12 min read
As a coder, concentration and mental focus become very important. Writing code is a very brain-intense activity which makes daily fluctuations of mental focus very obvious. I already noticed this while studying medicine. Luckily, studying medicine is not an activity which requires a lot of brain activity (it’s more about being organised). When I started…
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Two Years of Sleep Optimization
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7 min read
As a kid, I became obsessed with my sleep. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I panicked – oh no, I’m not getting enough sleep for school tomorrow! As a good Asian kid, that thought was very scary. I would blame my bed, mattress or pillow of making too much noise or being uncomfortable. My parents…
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Asking Stupid Questions
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7 min read
After graduating from Medical School, I started working at a startup as a software engineer. While I did learn a lot of things in this time, one thing which sticks out particularly is asking stupid questions. You may have noticed that businesspeople have the striking ability to talk about things very persuasively and in a…
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Writing a HTTP API Client in Elixir for the Noun Project
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25 min read
Doing some HTTP requests is usually one of the first things I do when I’m learning a new language (apart from comparing its performance in highly artificial benchmarks and checking whether it scales). Of all the “up-and-coming languages with great concurrency” Elixir is one of the most promising. While the community is awesome, the library…
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Dockerizing Django, uWSGI and Postgres the serious way
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19 min read
So you want to get in on the hot new stuff and decided it’s time to learn Docker. Good on you! Docker is the new kid on the block which allows you to containerize stuff. Well, not really – it’s not that new at all. I tend to miss these pieces of software which emerge…
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Open-Sourcing breast_segment
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2 min read
Fully automated Breast Segmentation on Mammographies After having tried (and failed) to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to identify Mammographies with malignant signs, I decided to open-source most of the pre-processing tools I had developed in the process. breast_segment is one of those. I was using Mammographies from the Digital Database for Screening Mammography which were…
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Framework Overflow
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6 min read
Sometimes I miss the old days in which you could simply yank out a bad PHP script interspersed with some HTML and – bezonga – you had a website. Since then, things have become somewhat more complicated. Sure, I could still use the old approach but that would be like stealing the Wright Brother’s airplane…