Blog

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How to bootstrap a tech conference with a 100% women+ speaker lineup

A tech conference focused on data and AI in the midst of a hype around machine learning, and LLMs in particular. Fair enough. But what we had in mind when planning the first edition of the Women+ in Data and AI summer festival in 2023 went beyond the latest trends in data engineering, machine learning, data science, and MLOps. We wanted to celebrate the excellence of women+ in the field. And to take it a step further, we wanted to provide our speakers and attendees with a safe and supportive environment - not only for learning, but also for networking and personal growth. Did we succeed?

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No future-proof architectures!

Architecture: The term itself radiates stability. It seems clear, then, that good architecture should be future-proof. But precisely this goal often leads to problems. Does that mean it is better not to design future-proof architectures?

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Is Platform Engineering the new DevOps?

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Concise Documentation – Revisited

You think architecture documentation is cumbersome and takes a long time to create? We will prove you wrong.

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Remote Mob Programming

The entire team is sitting in an online meeting and developing software together. One person types the code while the others discuss. Sound strange? That is remote mob programming, an exciting style of work for distributed teams. Read on to learn what it’s all about and which advantages and disadvantages you can expect.

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What is a Data Product?

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Improve your CSP with Style Nonces in Angular 16

What to do, to enable your Angular application to use style-src: nonce in a CSP for stricter security rules

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A natural language calculator

In my prior post I’ve written about how to run a chat with a large-language-model on your PC. This time I want to focus on scripting this with Node.js and letting the AI- and the “normal”-world interact with each other.

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Accessibility on the Web Part 2

Accessible Content

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How we cut our website’s carbon emissions in half

Between 2010 and 2030, the environmental impact of the digital world is expected to triple. While network infrastructure and devices get more and more efficient, all of these improvements are eaten up by more and more people and devices being connected to the internet, but especially by websites which are becoming more and more bloated. On the desktop, the average page weight of a single web page is four times as much now as it was in 2010. On mobile devices, it’s even more dramatic: The average page weight is ten times as much as in 2010. In the summer of 2022, we decided that it’s about time that we take action and start decarbonising our company website.

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Does BI Software Make Sense for Development Teams?

Time is a valuable asset, and it is easily consumed by the analysis and preparation of data. In other words, there may be good reason to come to grips with BI software.

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Accessibility on the Web Part 1

Creating a Web Application

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Build an internal development platform

We are currently breaking down our software into smaller pieces, such as SCS or microservices, and deploying them on cloud platforms to take advantage of their elasticity and flexibility. However, as our technology stack grows more complex, it has become increasingly challenging for our development teams to focus on business goals while also meeting operational requirements. In order to streamline the development process and provide easy self-service options, we are exploring the implementation of an internal development platform. To address these challenges, we have identified several open-source projects that can be integrated into our platform to enhance the development experience. Although this list is not exhaustive, it provides a solid foundation for creating a more effective platform. Our aim is to help development teams stay focused on business goals by minimising distractions and addressing operational needs.

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AI Tools in Business Environments

Currently, the importance of AI tools is growing at a breathtaking pace and has also gained importance in the general public. More and more companies and organizations are relying on the advantages of artificial intelligence to improve their processes, increase their productivity, or better serve their customers. AI tools are able to reliably analyze data, recognize patterns, and make predictions that can already surpass human abilities in some areas. This makes them a valuable tool for optimizing business processes and developing innovative products and services. It’s no wonder that the demand for AI tools has exponentially increased in recent years and will continue to grow.

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Evolving software like an orchardist

Comparing apple trees with software modernization

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Drawers for Product Owners

The duties of the Product Owner role are a regular topic of discussion. Because the role is understood in a variety of different ways, new and different terms are regularly encountered. It is time to take a different view that considers the relevant context.

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Running an AI Chatbot on Your Own PC

Llama.cpp, gpt4all and others make it very easy to try out large language models. Here’s a short guide to trying them out under Linux or macOS.

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Why Your Team Needs Data Products

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Draw The Diff

Software developers have an idiosyncratic penchant for boxes and arrows. Back when we used to go to the office we penned them on whiteboards. Later, as the force majeure accelerated the digital transformation of our economies, we drew them online.

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Babylon as a Feature

The Tower of Babylon is a myth meant to explain why the world’s peoples speak different languages. In modern IT systems, it’s often a requirement to support multiple languages. Such internationalization (i18n for short) is a tough challenge – and this post describes a simple solution to just the tiny part of multilingual documents. Our solution combines the simplicity of the plain-text format AsciiDoc with a simple yet versatile build script to support multiple languages (like EN and DE) and multiple output formats (like PDF and HTML).

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Assessing the Sustainability Impact of Startups

A Guide for Entrepreneurs

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An Introduction to TLA+ and Its Use in Parties

TLA+ is a system for modeling all possible states of a system. On this model, you can then verify certain properties of this system. Smart people can use this to check that their thread scheduling runs all threads equally, or that their work queue will never overflow. In this article, we’ll try and verify the fraught process of ordering pizza for a pizza party as a small introduction to the concepts and syntax of TLA+.

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Property-based Testing with “fast-check”

It isn’t exactly news that developers have to write not only code but also tests. Nevertheless, many find this to be burdensome and monotonous work. Plus, it is far from guaranteed that unit tests actually cover all the border and non-border cases. A modern approach is property-based testing, which consists of specifying an abstract condition that is then automatically checked by the test framework.

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How to Encrypt a File on the JVM

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Creating data products with Terraform on AWS

Have you heard of data mesh? Are you intrigued by its potential but uncertain how to get started building data mesh and data products? If so, this article outlines a potential approach and delves into the key concepts behind it!