There are a few lessons that have stood out to me, over the past few years of working as a software engineer. Learn about the problem Learn everything about the problem you’re trying to solve, or the existing solution, before you start building the new solution. Learning everything about the existing system in detail would often have saved me a lot of time when working on the implementation of the new system. ...
Maybe you’ve wondered if paying for a music streaming service is actually worth it, or whether you would be better off economically just buying the songs on itunes. To find out whether we’ve all been wasting money on our beloved streaming services, we’ll use following values (CHF is the swiss national currency): Cost per song bought (iTunes): 1.30 CHF Monthly cost for music streaming service (Apple music): 12.90 CHF --> Flat cost for Apple Music: 12.90 CHF * 12 = 154.80 CHF --> Amount of songs I can buy with this money: 154.80 CHF / 1.30 CHF ≈ 119 songs Fancy graph ...
Hey, It’s been a while since I last posted on here. Well, I’m back with a quick note on how to configure Mastodon to use Openstack Swift (Openstack’s pendant to S3) for media storage. I recently setup my own mastodon instance (nerdhut.ch) on Infomaniak’s public cloud which runs Openstack. Installing and setting up Mastodon went all smooth, however configuring it to use Swift took me a bit of time since there’s quite a bit of lack of documentation. ...
Uninterrupted work time is very important for software engineering. It allows us to dive deep into the code and get work done. Sometimes it’s even possible to enter a so called flow state, where the code just seems to flow. However, it can be rather difficult to get some of that precious uninterrupted work time unless you’re a freelancer or self-employed. Following list contains tools which I’ve found useful to get some uninterrupted work time: ...
A recent side project of me has been to write a scalable crawler which looks for broken resources (links, stylesheets, …) on a website. This project is meant to replace an existing crawler written in PHP with a more efficient implementation in golang. Part of writing a crawler includes parsing URLs on pages. Thankfully golang has the url.Parse method which makes this job easy, though there are a couple of caveats to look out. ...