Categories
Blog Finance

Taking Control of Your Finances. Part 1: Bookkeeping in Spreadsheets

This is the beginning of a new series of articles on personal finance. In this series of posts, I want to show you how you can get an overview of your personal finances, your assets, and where your money is going. And you can do all of this without paying for additional software or services, just by using the spreadsheet software you already have.
As part of this series, you will not only learn how to manage your own finances, you will also learn a lot about spreadsheets, double-entry bookkeeping, and even some programming if you want to.

Categories
Blog Transportation

Drones vs Dabbawalas

Delivery drones have been in the news for the past few years. Now they are starting to be used in the real world. In the Chinese high-tech city of Shenzen, delivery drones are now delivering food.

Categories
Blog Transportation

The Hyperloop in a Historical Perspective

When you think of modern concepts for transportation, you are probably thinking of the Hyperloop. It promises to connect the centers of major cities much faster than air travel. The idea is to run magnetic levitation trains in a vacuum inside a tube. Many people find this idea fascinating because it sounds like science fiction come true. But is the idea really that new? In this article, I will show you some historical projects that predate the idea of the Hyperloop by more than a hundred years.

Categories
Allgemein Blog Software Development

Antifragility in Software Systems

Currently I am devouring Nassim Taleb’s amazing book “Antifragile.” In this essay, Taleb describes how societies and organisations can survive in the long term by not only becoming robust against adversity, but even thriving in the face of change and volatility. This got me thinking: Can we apply these ideas to software?

Categories
Blog Engineering Software Development

How a Bugfix Can Take the Wrong Turn

When you debug your code to find a problem in your program, you observe the behavior of the program and make assumptions about the nature of the problem. But the behavior you observe can lead you to the wrong conclusions. Based on the wrong conclusions, you would design a fix that might look good at first glance, but would fix nothing or even make things worse.
In this article, I will give an example of a bug hunt that went down the wrong path. Read on to see how even seemingly simple systems can be surprisingly difficult to get right.

Categories
Blog Software Development

ChatGPT, write a Game for Me

A colleague recently asked me what I would do for a living once AI replaces computer programmers. After my initial (hopefully) witty answer, I began to wonder: How good is AI really at doing a programmer’s job? I had read about it, but never tried it myself. So I decided to put ChatGPT to the test.

In my test, I wanted to see if ChatGPT could do real programming. As I wrote before, programming is a creative task. How well would a computer be able to do it? Or would it just repeat examples from the Internet? I decided to interview ChatGPT, just like I would interview a new employee or student to see how experienced the candidate is in software development. Read on to see how well ChatGPT did in my interview.