Visionary entrepreneur and software developer
The experiment maplibre-voice lets you control a map in the browser with voice commands. The LLM behind this application will try to understand the command and transform it into an API query that returns the data. . This dynamic capability sets this project apart from similar attempts at controlling a map with voice commands.
The TCX file format is used by Garmin devices and other devices to store data such as GPS coordinates, heart rate, and other sensor data. You can export it for example from the Garmin Connect application. This video helps you understand how you can use the CLI tool tcx-ls to look into a TCX file and analyze it.
When software developers create new open source projects, often they create what they think is useful and fun to make. If the programmer or company has more ambition though, the project can benefit from the SWOT analysis developed by the strategic management literature. This article shows how the SWOT analysis can benefit open source projects.
Spices have shaped human civilization, driving exploration, trade, and culinary innovation for millennia. Today, I'm excited to introduce SpiceNice, a comprehensive open-source database that brings structured information about culinary spices and their source plants to everyone – from professional chefs to home cooks, botanists to farmers. A section on free literature about spices completes the…
All the big cloud providers like AWS and Azure have an API for the sythesis of text into the spoken word. But there are also young startups like ElevenLabs that offer their innovative solutions in this space. A third option is open source software for those who either do not want to pay for the service of TTS (text-to-speech) or do need on-device TTS. That is why in this article I want to provide…
The headless open source content management system (CMS) Strapi can be dockerized and deployed via Docker to the cloud. In this article I want to show how to deploy Strapi to the Digital Ocean App Platform as a Docker container.
Although COBOL can be considered a legacy language, there are still billions of lines of COBOL in production. Modernizing these systems which are costly to run and maintain is a challenge. One solution to this issue is a COBOL to Go transpiler that I want to present in this article.
With WebAssembly you can integrate different programming languages together. This opens up new possibilities to use great libraries written in one language in another different platform. In this article I want to show how to integrate a Go library for sentence tokenization in a JavaScript webpage.
The World Factbook by the U.S. government contains a plethora of facts of all of the countries of this world. Up until now it was not easy to query and visualize the contained data. The open source project chi-country-facts is a GraphQL API of the World Factbook. I want to present it in this article.
Normally, when buying a home light that you want to control electronically, you need to install custom software. But with the ZigBee protocol and the RaspBee II gateway, you can use compatible devices and open source software. In this article I will show you how to add a custom Go API service to the stack.
Functional programming style in JavaScript has become more popular in recent years. Therefore, it is important to know examples of pure functions that are available to all JavaScript developers. They are the preferred way to use functional programming in JavaScript.
In many circumstances it is convenient to work remotely using Visual Studio Code. There is a fine VS Code extension that allows you to work on a remote machine as if it was your local machine. This is great for things like embedded programming or developing in the cloud. Read here how to do this.
Often people use Nest.js and Prisma together when they program a backend application. Then there is the question of how to deploy the application with Docker. This article shows you how.
React Three Fiber is a React wrapper for the Three.js library, facilitating the integration of 3D objects into React applications. It claims similar speed and feature capabilities as Three.js directly. In this article, I show you by using a demo application how to display a glTF model in the browser.
Discover how to enhance your React components with type safety using TypeScript typings for events. Delve into browser events and their role in notifying applications of user or browser-triggered changes. Explore the world of React events and learn how to handle them effectively with TypeScript.
In a digital landscape where visual content reigns supreme, the demand for efficient and high-quality web image formats has never been greater. Discover the secrets behind next-generation formats in the browser that promise to redefine the way we consume and share visual information.
The production of plastics is a major contributor to environmental pollution. But there are alternative ways to produce plastics. Biopolymers are one of them. They are biodegradable and can be used as a replacement for plastics. In this article I want to highlight some companies that produce biopolymers for packaging.
With the rise of web conferencing and video calls, the need for good audio quality has become more important than ever. This article will give you an overview of the different audio codecs used on the web and how they compare to each other.
Whenever you start learning a new language, you will be confronted with the question of how to learn vocabulary. There are many different approaches to this problem, but one of the most popular is to learn the most common words first. Using my powerful word frequency lists, you can learn the most common words in a foreign language quickly and efficiently.
I love reading books. But I also like to read books on my tablet or my laptop. Using an application like Honkit, you can create great-looking ebooks from markdown files. These ebooks are easy to distribute and can be read using the browser. This article explains how to create ebooks with Honkit.
WebAssembly defines a portable binary-code format for executable programs. It can be used to run languages that support WebAssembly in the browser. Thus, you are no longer restricted to only use JavaScript in the browser. In this article I want to show you which programming languages currently support WebAssembly.
Today the market for architectural CAD (Computer Aided Design) software is mostly closed-source and has a monopolistic structure. A few big companies dominate the market. In this article I want to lay out a vision for an alternative future of an open source ecosystem.
Systemd is great for starting and stopping services under Linux. When you want to start a Python application that uses virtualenv, you need to take special care. This article explains how to create a systemd script using the example of the open source Timetagger Python application.
Checklists can be useful tools to handle the complexities of modern life. Used by pilots and other professions handling complex tasks, checklists can also be useful for software developers. Read more in this article about a quality checklist for publishing NPM packages
When programming applications that run embedded on a Raspberry Pi, it is often convenient to work on a more powerful machine. In this article, I want to show how to edit remotely from a Mac programming code that runs directly on the Raspberry Pi. As a comfortable IDE, I use Visual Studio Code.
In light of the current short supply of Raspberry Pis, I want to share information about an alternative single board computer, the Odroid N2+. The Odroid N2+ can be used to host a number of applications using Docker. Portainer makes the administration of Docker containers easy on the Odroid N2+.
When you use GitLab to host your web software development project source code, you can deploy your website to Cloudflare Pages. Normally, you would use the GitLab CI pipeline to build your website project. So in this article, I show you how to configure your GitLab CI to deploy to Cloudflare Pages.
When using Storybook in React applications to showcase and document your components, creating the Storybook file is often a repetitive task. Therefore, I want to show a quick alternative using the popular Hygen code generator.
Vue 3 is now the default and recommended version of Vue. It has a number of great improvements that make it more valuable for programmers. So what are the best UI component libraries with support for Vue 3 available today?
You often need a web interface for your Raspberry Pi projects. Flask is a Python framework that makes it easy to program web APIs. Then you need to add all the deployment steps to automatically run the Flask application. Here I want to show how you can do this with Gunicorn, Nginx and systemd.
With the advent of the new technology of WebAssembly, it is possible to leverage other languages than JavaScript in the browser. Go is one popular language that you can call from your JavaScript web application. This article shows how to do that with TinyGo.
With the proposed flight to Mars and its exploration, there is a long stay required by the astronauts under claustrophobic conditions. Could Virtual Reality (VR) systems alleviate some stress of long stays in space?
Everybody knows the contact forms on website where users can send text message to the website owner. But how could you design a contact form that allows the recording of an audio message? In this article I want to show you how to do that.
Underground agriculture is an emerging field of agriculture that has the potential to help solve a big part of the current ecological crisis. How this can be achieved I want to explain in this article.
Netlify Functions are serverless code that are easy to deploy. Here I want to show how to program a simple Netlify Function to send a contact message from my website to an email address and log it into an Airtable sheet.
The construction industry's value stands at 11 trillion USD worldwide in 2020. It is an important industry, but it is slow to embrace modern technology. How could the property industry become more open?
Often you need to record audio on a mobile device and send it to a server for further processing. In this article, I show you how to do that with React Native and Flask.
MDX allows you to write JSX in Markdown documents. You can embed these components in your document. In this article, I show how to configure your Next.js application to work with MDX.
Many websites need to visualize data in charts. This article compares three of the most popular open source charting libraries (Chart.js, Plotly.js and ECharts) from the perspective of the software developer.
GitLab is a popular git-focused DevOps platform. Netlify is a cloud computing startup that offers to host your static site. In this article, I show how to configure the GitLab build pipeline to deploy to a Netlify project.
The Americas were the frontier for European settlers during much of the 15th to 19th century. Today everything seems to be explored and settled. But looking closer, one can identify five modern frontiers that are worth discovering.
Conventional Commits is a specification for writing standardized git commit messages. This article is about how to use conventional commits conveniently in Visual Studio Code.
Cypress is a popular tool for end-to-end testing for web applications. Often you want to be sure you did not forget console messages or did not introduce errors in your final application. This article shows how to test for that in Cypress.
LitElement is a Web Component library by Google. It succeeds the Polymer library and strives for speed and compatibility with the Web Components standard. How to integrate LitElements into your React application and use event handling, I want to show in this article.
Octave is a free and open source scientific computing platform. It is especially suited for mathematical operations and has a simple mechanism to plot the data. Trigonometry visualizations are especially powerful with Octave.
For every serious web application, you should choose a component library. This article compares Material UI, Fluent UI React, Ant Design, React Spectrum and Semantic UI React.
Interactive maps on the web are a great way to visualize information. How to create an interactive outline map with React of the city of Munich, I want to show in this article.
In every responsive web project, you need media queries to adapt to different screen sizes. Styled components are a popular way to write CSS styles in React applications. This article proposes a way to write media queries with the styled components library Emotion.
Social distancing has shaped an increase in usage of remote working tools. One such tool is Jitsi video conferencing. In this article, I want to describe how easy it is to spin up a free video conferencing server.
With Gatsby, you can generate a static website that works great with cloud storage solutions like Google Cloud Storage. How to configure Gatsby and use Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform I want to show in this article.