This is a short summary of the talk How to think by André Staltz. He compares the human thinking process to the one of a computer and explains some tips on how to come up with good ideas. Nothing too ground-breaking, but I still thought I’d write it down because I like the brain-computer analogy (and their vast differences).

After analysing early swiss corona data in one of my previous posts I figured it was indeed necessary for people to become aware of how important it is to follow the measures to prevent the spread of the virus. We hear it all the time: Wash your hands, stay at home, wear a mask. But we don’t really feel or see if this actually helps. Of course there are scientific explanations and studies, but still, it is hard to imagine how exponential growth works and that you can literally save lives just by washing your hands. But you can, and you probably should. To help everyone get a better understanding of the situation I created a little interactive simulation that visualizes the impact of several prevention measures.

Prettier is an opinionated code formater. I use it to assure a uniform format throughout a codebase with zero effort from contributers. In the end I don’t really care if a codebase uses single or double quotes, spaces or tabs or whatever. But I do care that it is the same everywhere in a project. With this mindset, I am very happy to accept whatever defaults some tool defines, becaue this once again means less setup effort. Here’s how we can do this in an Angular project, where tslint is already setup:

Auch wenn ich langsam die Nase voll von Corona habe, konnte ich es als Hobby Data-Scientist natürlich trotzdem nicht lassen, die vorhandenen Schweizer COVID-19 Daten mal genauer zu untersuchen. In diesem Post zeige ich, wie leicht man mit Python, Libraries wie matplotlib und pandas und der interaktiven Jupyter Umgebung eine sehr einfache Datenanalyse durchführen kann.

State machines are an important concept of computer science, specifically automata theory. But they are also quite common in our every day life and consequently equally common in software engineering problems. However, depending on the complexity of the domain and business logic, just implementing a simple state pattern can turn out to be much more complicated than initially anticipated.

Code reviews are an important practice for quality assurance in software projects. They should be taken seriously and the reviewers should try to review code as soon as possible to minimize the developers cost of context-switching.