Nov 14

7 Smart Home Applications You Should Consider

Smart Home 102: Devices and Automations

You can find “smart” devices everywhere: Light bulbs, dishwashers, toothbrushes, adult toys. Just about everything that has electricity. Typically, this just means that those devices are able to make a connection to a hub.

There are big promises of smart homes: More convenience, lower cost, a higher standard of living…

The Ultimate Smart Home Starter Guide

Smart Home 101: Sensors, Actors, Rules, Protocols, and Hubs

The five big components of Smart Homes are Sensors, Actors, Protocols, Rules, and Interfaces. Don’t worry, I’ll explain that! Image by Martin Thoma

I’ve recently started looking into smart home topics and felt overwhelmed. There is a plethora of different devices, manufacturers, and systems. After reading this article you will understand what the important components are and have an overview to put everything into context. Let’s start!

The Basic Concepts

A smart home consists of four…

How to Annoy a Data Scientist in 11 easy steps 😉

A guide for software developers and operations

Do you really hate your Data Scientist / Data Analyst? Here is a guide on how to annoy the hell out of them 😈

№1: Avoid repetition — Good prose needs synonyms!

9 Clean Code Patterns I wish I knew earlier

Do you know the feeling when you look back at code which you wrote early in your career? I always feel a bit horrified. But there is a positive side to it: I learned something new 😄

A core part of good software is readability. Keeping the mental complexity low…

How Concurrency can Break your Software

Race conditions related to insufficient transaction isolation

We have seen phenomenal improvements in the hardware in the last 30 years. Moore observed that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles roughly every two years, the CPU clock rate increased from 740 kHz in 1970 to 4.9 GHz in 2021, and the types of…

Python 3.10 is Released. Know What’s New and If It’s Worth the Switch

Improvements in type annotation, structural pattern matching, better error messages, and performance

Photo by Vraj Shah from pexels and Mike from pexels, edited by Martin Thoma

Python 3.10 was released on the 4th of October 2021 according to PEP 619. Let’s see what’s in store for us.

Type Annotations

I absolutely love type annotations. Since Python 3.6, they are super useful. If you don’t use them already, I highly recommend you to read my introduction.

Python 3.10 has…

What developers need to know about PDF

Standards, functions, usage, terminology

PDF is sometimes called “digital paper”. That is only true sometimes. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

PDF is a file format that was created to print in exactly the same way everywhere. It was not intended to be a format for data exchange. Nowadays, it is used in all organizations. …

Performance Testing for Web Services

What it is, aspects to consider, and tools you can use

We all want software to be reliable and use minimum resources. Those are non-functional requirements and they need to be tested. In this article, we focus on web services. This means requirements like minimum energy consumption or mobile network usage are irrelevant.

After reading the article you will have a…

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 Emoji One; Simon Eugster; Artoria2e5; Smalllikeart (Old, Halogen, CFL, LED)

Electricity is pretty expensive in Germany. We pay around 0.30 EUR/kWh. A normal two person household uses around 2500 kWh/year which makes 750 EUR per year for electricity. This means it’s worth to think about reducing the cost.

After reading this article you will know how to get the perfect…

Bugs, Issues, Flaws, Faults, Failures, Errors, and Defects

So many things that can go wrong

Issues are a pretty general term which I also like to use as a super category of the rest. An error is a mistake. If the mistake reaches the user, it is a fault. The fault is the cause of a failure. It’s called defect if it’s found during development time, bug when it’s found while testing and failure when the user finds it. Image created by Martin Thoma.

Bug, Issue, Failure, Error, and Defect are often used synonymous, but there are differences:

An error is a mistake done by the programming error or the usage error. Not every mistake leads to follow-up issues.
A defect is an error found during the development phase whereas a bug is a…