Improvements that we will never see Sometimes the cost of change is just too high Our world is not ideal. Many small decisions which are kind of arbitrary and could have easily been done different …

I’ve recently seen this trick on TikTok: You give an LLM an image and ask it to generate an “Advanced JSON context profile”. Here is what it gives you:

ChatGPT and Google Gemini have become a tool that I use on a daily basis. I would like to use it for general fact checking, but I’m afraid that the LLM might confidently make wrong statements —…

The US isn’t the same since Trump took office. April 2025 was especially crazy from an economic perspective: The US had a GDP of $29724 Billion USD in 2024. A 1% loss would mean almost $300 Billion…

Phishing is a type of scam in which the attacker disguises himself/herself as a trustworthy entity to make the victim perform an action. For example, the attacker could present himself as your bank…

In school you have 10–35 students in one room, being taught by one teacher. The teacher speaks, the students listen. While there are some variations, this is true for 70% of the time at school since…

Imagine you’re driving to a supermarket. While you’re shopping, your car is automatically re-charging for an acceptable price. You don’t have to plug it in. You don’t have to compare prices. You…

I originally wanted to write about the three characteristics that lead to high worker-income: Providing high value (e.g. doctors), having a good negotiation position due to supply/demand (e.g. senior…

In this article I’ll describe some patterns I’ve noticed that help to make the pull request (PR) process smooth and productive. But it’s not only that. If you make many unrelated changes, it’s hard…

Mobile devices are laptops, tablets, and smarphones. The issue with mobile devices is that they get lost if you have enough employees/devices. You also cannot easily physically access them when you…

An (n+1) query is a performance issue that happens in backend development. Instead of doing one query to show n objects, one does one query to get the objects and n additional query to get detail information. Example Imagine you have a website about…

offset, limit, order, filtering, performance, and UX In times of infinite scrolling, you might be tempted to think that pagination doesn’t matter. But even infinite scrolling sites use pagination under the hood for their backends. They automatically…

Host Discovery via Ping First, you want to see who/what else is in the network. To do so, you want to execute a ping to every single address in the network. When you get a response, you know somebody is there: # Find your network$ ifconfig | grep…

People want to be good in their jobs and make decisions they can justify. For this reason, data-driven decisions are a wildly popular concept. One of the most expensive parts of software development is the salary of software engineers. Hence it makes…

People use “open source” and “free software” as synonyms but are not. All Free Software is open source, but not all open-source software is free software. Free software is free as in “free speech”, not as in “free beer”. That is the philosophy of…

As a backend developer, I sometimes have the need to check which requests are sent, including the headers and the payload. It’s enormously useful to have a local tool which can check that. I’ve just released postbin: A simple small webserver which…

A proxy forwards requests. They can filter or change requests. A forward proxy takes are request for the user and forwards it to a website. Examples are: Privoxy: A forward proxy which helps to protect privacy (German Talk from 2016). You can also…

A Virtual Private Network (short: VPN) is a mechanism that which allows you to remotely connect your computer to a private network over a public channel such as the internet. The VPN routes your traffic over the VPN provider. This means you don’t…

Localtime, timezones, and Calendars Localtime is what you see when you look at your watch. It’s what changes when you move far away in other countries. The concept is pretty simple: A day is one full rotation of Earth. We split that into 24 segments…

A photovoltaic system on your home is pretty neat: You produce a big chunk of the energy you need yourself. But it’s also expensive. Does it make economic sense? The amount of variables to answer this question is overwhelming. Don’t worry, I’ll break…