Hi, Do you know the feeling? You turn on a device that you use over and over again. For years. You recognize the sound it makes. The rhythmic “whoosh whoosh whoosh”, when you start the dishwasher. Or the familiar “click” when the oven turns on. Your signal: everything’s working. Carry on! But what if it suddenly sounds different? It no longer meets your expectations? That’s exactly what happened to me with my microwave.
Hi, “The VPN should not be operated by you [Sysadmins].” After this sentence, I saw startled faces. It slipped out of me. During the weekly Jour Fixe between the developers and admins. It came to the question of what our priorities are. It hit a nerve. Probably not because the participants are emotionally attached to the VPN. Probably not because the statement is wrong. No - it’s more likely because it’s so unconventional for the team.
Hi, What distinguishes an application from a (mathematical) function? A function takes an input x and transforms it into an output. If f(x) = 2 * x, then the result of this function for the input of any x is always the same. There are no side effects. We call this behavior stateless. But what does this have to do with the question from the beginning? An application goes beyond this. (Almost) every application must work with state. As soon as we have I/O operations in our system, we inherently have state. And often a method call, with the same input, can yield different results at different times. And this is also unavoidable and is in the nature of the task we want to solve.
Hi, Last week, emotions were running high. One of my clients achieved something extraordinary. They have successfully operated a product for 10 years. Highly profitable. But the project was not started by trained developers. It began as a side product. The initial developers were career changers. Highly interested, motivated, engaged, and experts in their domain. And they accomplished something that fails in 9 out of 10 cases. Their product is actively used. Customers happily pay for it. It solves a real problem. In a niche that hardly any other company can occupy.
Hi, Our intuition often plays tricks on us. Especially in statistics. Humans are not made to intuitively understand statistical relationships. For example, the Birthday Paradox . What do you think? What’s the probability that in a room with 23 people, two have the same birthday? 5%? 10%? 20%? … Wrong. The probability is 50%. If you look at two classrooms, statistically, one class will have a shared birthday. In a room with 50 people, the probability is even over 97%.
Marcus Held