Coding
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Don’t Be an Engineer, Be a Producer
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3 min read
I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1]. I was deeply impressed by the section about Gunpei Yokoi, the guy at Nintendo who was the driving force behind the NES and Game Boy. I have fond memories of the Game Boy; everyone who was a kid in the nineties does. This awesome thing you could hold in our hands,…
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Zigbee-enabled light bulbs. Wifi-connected air purifiers. Autonomous thermostats. The smart home. Great technology. And just like with machine learning and blockchain, we humans don’t quite know yet what to do with it yet. Similar to those technologies, the smart home offers solutions for non-existent problems. Now I can control my light bulbs from an app…
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We need more Hackers
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6 min read
The Hacker’s First Project When I was a kid, I wanted to code my own website. I was already using Dreamweaver to crank out static HTML web pages but this was different. I needed to learn PHP to create a website which would earn passive income for the rest of my life. Very important! The…
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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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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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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…
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Parse.com Cloud Code Hell
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8 min read
I would really, really love to be able to like Cloud Code. The idea of simplifying any backend into one unified platform with push-capabilities and node.js-style extendability sounds awesome. However, I ended up struggling. I am by no means a good programmer but as long as an SDK is coherent in itself and well-documented, it’s…