You are playing the association game “Code Names”. The words are: Blue: ski, star, fish, blind, tip, file, cotton, scarecrow Red: bond, sound, park, penny, bee, tokyo, walrus, hospital, suba diver Black: boil neutral: angel, captain, bass, casino, day, goldilocks, field You are the red spy master. It’s your turn…

How long can you heat your home with a Tesla? — Modern electric cars have huge batteries and modern homes heat using heat pumps and thus electricity. Theoretically, you could heat a home using a Tesla. But how long would it last? Heat Energy Usage

The Monkey-Ladder Experiment is a parabel from Competing for the future by Gary Hamel and C. K. Prahalad (1996) and goes like this: 4 monkeys in a room. In the center of the room is a tall pole with a bunch of bananas suspended from the top. One of the…

People don’t make security advisories. They might not even explicitly state that there was/is a security issue. — This is a warning to my fellow software developers. I’m writing this article as the current maintainer of pypdf and PyPDF2, probably the most widely used PDF packages in the Python ecosystem. …

Focusing purely on the economic view — When I started investing, I read a lot about ETFs, stocks, and the stock market. I started with a time deposit as I felt super insecure. Once I understood ETFs and the stock market better, I continued with that. Now that I own a house, I’m thinking about investing in…

One of my favorite articles is “Is it worth changing the lightbulb”. The article contains the following table that shows rather clearly that it’s pretty much always worth replacing old incandescent light bulbs by LEDs: However, even within the category of LEDs there are differences. The EU has given us…

Cooking is a common analogy to programming. You have to write down instructions in a very clear way as the computer just executes those instructions — not more, not less. We are not used to make such precise instructions, which is hilariously shown in the “exact instructions challenge”: Computers…

In today’s digital landscape, web security threats have become increasingly sophisticated and pervasive. As our reliance on the internet continues to grow, it becomes crucial for organizations to implement robust security measures to protect their digital assets and users’ sensitive information. One such security measure that has gained significant attention…

Improve the output for better readability — Pytest allows a lot of customization for the look-and-feel. Output formats for the progress, the results, the diffs in error cases. While you can do it all yourself, there are tons of plugins. Test setup I used the pypdf test suite in most screenshots. …