Nikolaus Piccolotto
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Tiles
I am sharing one early project in my Ph.D. that I could not get published. I think it is kind of cute and it would be a shame if I’d just delete it. It’s a way to overlay spatial locations by non-overlapping grid cells which are aligned only on one axis. The other axis is free so as to better capture the point cloud’s outline. Reviewers sort of liked it but rejected our…
Ph.D. Thesis
I defended my Ph.D.! You can find my thesis here , if you are interested. 
 The context of my research was a statistical analysis method that one could summarize as “Principal Component Analysis for Temporal or Spatial Data”. The method has certain properties that can improve/ease the analysis and modeling of temporal/spatial datasets, but it does not come for free: Challenges when…
App-wide CLI Configuration in Python
Recently I had the situation where I had a Python-based program to be used in a command line interface (CLI). But the program had many configuration options and I wanted a flexible way to deal with defaults and overriding them, while changing as little code as possible. I didn’t find great results on Google’s first page, so I thought I write it up here. 
 The problem with a…
My first mechanical keyboard, and how you can get one too
People in my Twitter stream would post pictures of their workplace every once in a while. More often than not, the picture would feature a fancy keyboard. I would then search the internet about it, get intringued, and leave it at that. But recently I went for it. 
 I’ll first list some advantages of custom mechanical keyboards, and then do my best to walk you through the process of getting…
Travel with Spotify
When I travel I like to get a feeling for the music from the place I will visit. Who are the romantic singers one should know? What was the popular boyband in the 90s? For a recent trip I copied artist names from a Wikipedia page into the Spotify search, and that clearly doesn’t scale. 
 Prior Art 
 There are several playlists from Spotify for kind of this purpose (“The…
Inspecting React Children
Suppose you write a frontend framework in React, like Bootstrap. (If it’s for the web or react-native doesn’t matter for the argument.) There are components for different text styles (MediumText, SmallText…), for popular control elements (Dropdown, Button…) and so on. You want this to be modular and composable, so you pass a different text component to the Button instead of setting a size property…
Glitch
You probably came across some visuals that can be categorized as Glitch Art . For instance, it’s heavily used in Pony Island as you modify the code and break out of the haunted arcade machine. 

 
 
 

 I generally like this style a lot and wanted to find out what needs to be done to glitch some images of classic art. As somebody already did it for the PNG format , I…
Correct Calculator
Bugs are a long-standing problem in the software industry: Invisible characters crash iOS Messages . FaceTime enables microphone before the call starts. . An integer underflow causes Gandhi to be super-aggressive in the original Civilization . There are many more examples. 
 One way to achieve code correctness that was always mysterious to me is formal verification: You prove logically that…
Building a Relay-compatible GraphQL Server
Read it over at the Zalando Tech Blog .
symdiff: prevent dead css
Some time ago I wrote a gulp plugin to enforce clean CSS in your frontend build. The idea, which I have from Github , is to break said build when the sets of classes in CSS and templates are not equal. This way you make sure you’re always actually using the styles you define and keep the amount of classes in your templates to a minimum. 
 I find it very useful and as of time of writing some…
Footnotes in pure CSS
Being a web developer is as much a blessing as it is a curse. One moment you’re reading an article about the most untradable players in the NBA by your favorite basketball author, the next you’re creeping around the footnote implementation of their site and wondering if Javascript is really necessary there. 1 
 Of course it isn’t. There are games written completely in CSS. And they are also…
underlin.es
You know all the CSS generators like CSSmatic or CSS arrow please ? I was looking for something similar, but for Medium -style text underlines (using background-image ) and, strangely, unable to find it. So here it is: underlin.es . 
 It’s called “underlin.es” like it was hosted on underlin.es , but it’s not. Originally I had the intention to, but at 1:30 AM I just wanted to get it done.
Diploma
My thesis project: A semantically-aided user assistance system for a composite information visualization system. 

 
 

FurPle
Back from the days in university: In a two-week seminar we built an app for Microsoft’s giant screen-as-a-table. The idea is to make furniture planning possible without physically moving furniture. 

 
 

Tophat 2K
Back from the days in university: In the seminar for haptic interaction we (Fabian Prager, Christopher Bellmann and me) built a tangible user interface that ought to help with private car sharing. Done with an Arduino of course. 

 
 

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 Nikolaus Piccolotto 
 hallo@npiccolotto.com