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New Year 2025 ** It’s New Year's Eve; as always — it’s time to remember what happened and think about what might happen in the future. Review of 2024 The US convicted Donald Trump of felony crimes in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election. Then a majority of the US voted … Read More »

New Year 2024 ** It’s New Year's Eve; as always — it’s time to remember what happened and think about what might happen in the future. Review of 2023 2023 was another year in which the Russo-Ukrainian war dominated other discussions. I also remember seeing the occasional weird news about Donald Trump facing … Read More »

Is it worth changing the Lightbulb? Switching for a more efficient lightbulb for economic reasons A rough estimation how much energy the four different types of lamps use to get a specific brightness. The old incandescent lamps are clearly the worst. Interestingly, LEDs get manufactured also for very low brightness lamps. This image was created by Martin Thoma. The light bulb images were created by … Read More »

Hooks vs Callbacks vs Webhooks How do I use them and where is the difference? Photo by Dan-Cristian Pădureț The Unix programming philosophy is to do (just) one thing but do it well. Focusing on one core task is hard as developers see and feel their users' pain points and desires. To be able to focus on the core product but allow additional functions … Read More »

Synchronous vs Asynchronous vs Concurrent vs Parallel What is the difference and why does it matter? Photo by Edurne Chopeitia on Unsplash We developers like to throw around terms that feel natural to us, but are technical terms that most non-developers don’t use in the same way. This article is aimed at all the poor souls who have to deal with us, e.g. product … Read More »

10 Robustness and Resiliency Design Patterns to Learn Today Software is correct if it acts as specified. It is robust if it can take a high load until it goes down. Software is resilient if it can go back to normal after a disruption. The disruption could be a power outage, a temporary network outage, a full disk, or … Read More »

How to use GPG Send and receive encrypted messages Having full control over encrypted messages is sometimes just nice and crucial in other situations and/or places in the world. GPG, the Gnu Privacy Guard, is a commonly used tool to encrypt, decrypt, and sign secrets. After reading this article, you will know how to use GPG. Let’s … Read More »

The 7 Types of Cryptocurrencies You Must Know Coins, Utility and Security tokens, Stablecoins and NFTs: Bringing order to an ecosystem Cryptocurrency Types in Overview Categorization of the top 30 cryptocurrencies + some chosen ones. Image by Martin Thoma The crypto ecosystem grew rapidly in the past years — so rapid, that it’s hard for outsiders to even understand the various use-cases in that space. After reading this article, you should have … Read More »

5 Applications of Digital Signatures Learn what they are and how they are used We use signatures to show that we have read a contract and want to do our part of fulfilling it. They serve two purposes: Expressing an intend and being able to prove to the authorities that this intend was expressed in case one of the parties does not follow the … Read More »

6 Alternatives to Classes in Python Speed of development, execution time, (de)serialization, and maintainability all play a role in making your code shine Photo by the author. As developers, we throw a lot of data around. The representation of data matters a lot and we need to be able to keep track of which variables represent which attributes. Configuration is a prime example of complex data. In the following article, I will use … Read More »