Backup types and strategies, storage solutions, and the requirements analysis you need to do — Let’s be honest: Everybody hates this topic. It’s not sexy. You just want a solution that works and that you can trust. You might not even have created backups — and I mean real backups, not randomly storing copies. I had the weirdest kinds of backups in the past. I…

What it is, why it matters, how it’s done, and how to prevent cryptojacking — Cryptojacking is the unexpected and unwanted use of computational resources to mine crypto-currencies. It’s hijacking resources to mine crypto-currencies. Don’t confuse it with ransomware doing crypto-locking. Crypto-locking prevents you from accessing your data and uses blackmailing to get money. Cryptojacking uses your computational resources like a parasite, but they don’t…

Confidentiality, Reliability, Privacy, Usability, Cross-Platform support… — So many things to consider! — Real-time communication using text, images, sound, or video is used by pretty much everybody today. We use it on our smartphones and desktop computers. We use it privately and for work. It’s used by prosecuted minorities as well as terrorists. This article gives an overview of wide-spread secure messaging systems…

I’m just curious. Going slow is better for your health. — I’ve realized that I don’t feel healthy anymore due to weight gain. Nothing too bad, but I don’t want it to become bad. Several factors influence your weight drastically which we don’t mean when we talk about “loosing weight”. For example, loosing a limb or loosing blood due to an…

What is an API? What makes it good or bad? — The speed at which we produce and exchange information has increased significantly within the past 200 years. It started with electromagnetic telegraphs in 1833, but it went wild as soon as the first email was sent in 1971. It was a revolution. Suddenly people around the globe could exchange written…

From Yelling to doing it yourself — Reporting issues is a core competency a lot of people lack. That is unfortunate not only for the companies who have to deal with angry customers who loudly complain but also for those customers because it’s unlikely their problem will get solved. When I think about issues, it’s from a…

To create a system that’s easier to maintain — I love writing good software. Software that is reliable and intuitively understandable by users as well as easy to maintain. It’s super hard to learn and teach what good software looks like, but I hope to plant some ideas with this article. After reading this article, you will have learned…

Explore your creativity by generating something beautiful — Algorithmically defined images are beautiful. There are tons of examples, even ones that are created without a computer. The key point is that you have a clear formal definition of how the image is created. After reading this article, you will know how to create the image above. Let’s start! Drawing lines with Pillow …

Regular expressions (RegEx) are a formal language to define simple patterns. It is commonly used to find interesting parts within a larger body of text or to validate data. It is typically fast and sometimes a clean solution. …