I won’t lie. I’m usually not the most competitive person out there. But when December nears, I’m getting a bit restless. And when I run into fellow players from previous year, the conversation quickly turns to the coming season of Advent of Code. “Will you be joining again this year?”, “Have you started preparing yet?”, “Which language will you use?” or “Going for the top position again this year?” are just some of the questions asked.

Though I’m not a fanatic participant in Advent of Code I still like to join in on the fun and challenge myself to solve the puzzles posted every day. I’m one of those players that plays whenever there is time, instead of the top players that set their alarm clocks to be at the ready when the assignment gets published.

When I opened up the assignment for this morning I was pleasantly surprised to see yet another one involving our beloved IntCode computer 😉 (As Jochem already predicted in his blog)
Today’s challenge involves moving a paint robot around using an IntCode program. There was just another twist. Now the IntCode’s program needed to output to a grid from which it read via the input operation. Fortunately for day 7 part 2 I already had to create a helper function that used a generator as input instead of a fixed set of values so I could easily reuse that again.

The word “responsive” is something we don’t mention that often these days in web development, it’s a standard already. There is a vast and ever-growing variety of screens. We want to be able to support all the possible sizes and still keep a good user experience. And CSS media-queries are a great solution to this challenge. But how about responsive components? Modern web development is about components and we need a way to make them responsive as well. Today I want to talk about ResizeObserver API, a new powerful tool for Responsive Web, which in contrast to media-queries, allows detecting a size change of a particular element rather than a whole viewport.

Mycroft is a voice system that can be configured for any language but it requires language files and most importantly a parser for that language. I was listening to some music the other day and this one line in a song really struck me: “Praat Nederlands met me” (“Speak Dutch to me”). I have been working on a Voice Assistant built on Mycroft for quite a while now but it was always in English. So I thought “How hard can it be?”. Well it is not that hard, but I learned a lot along the way. I’ll show you the steps you need to take to achieve this followed by some insights into how language support is evolving within the Mycroft ecosystem.

Are you using pair programming to learn from your peers, write better code and save time spent on code reviews? In that case, you might want to make it visible on your digital issue board too. However, in Azure DevOps, you can only have a single assignee per task. Through customizing your process and board you can still show who are working together on a task. Here is how to do it.

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Do you sometimes feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day? Reliving the same day over and over again? I sure feel like that in some discussions with my team: revisiting the same discussion multiple times, because we fail to document decisions properly. Redrawing that diagram one more time, to come to the same conclusion. Searching for that one document in your email? Sifting through several versions of the same document, not sure which version is the latest? 

Next time around you can avoid these situations, using simple tools that your team is already using: Git and Markdown. Add Architecture Decision Records into the mix to capture the important decisions and the context in which those decisions were made.

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Did you ever find a problem of which you weren’t sure it was a bug? You probably thought it over, looked up the requirements or discussed with a team member. Perhaps you figured it out by yourself, the requirements made things clear or your team member could help you out. Either way, you needed some source of information to recognise the problem as a bug. You used your mental models and oracles.Read more →

Man, Apache Spark is some powerful stuff! Add a fancy and fun language called Scala and you feel like you can do a whole lot of cool things with a lot of flexibility! This is my current standpoint on the subject, after a short year of working with this setup. The first month was a completely different story. Let me share some tips that really helped me out when I started working on an existing Scala-Spark codebase.

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Hardly a day goes by without someone asking whether low-code tools like Outsystems or Mendix are suitable for developing their applications in, or if they can use a tool like Tosca or Katalon to automate their tests in. The answer, as always, is “it depends” :-). 

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In this blog series, I’ll discuss five quality patterns in Agile development to deliver the right software with great quality.

For years now companies have been adopting Agile ways of working and mostly the Scrum framework as their way to develop software. Scrum is all about working in dedicated teams on small increments of working software. Software that can potentially be released every single sprint. I’m sure you agree with me that this means that this software is therefore always tested every sprint as well. How could we otherwise release it right? This blog is about a trend I have noticed in a lot of companies that after time teams have more and more issues delivering quality software that conforms to business requirements.

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