2025-09-02 | My Colleague With the Super Power!
I once had a colleague with a super power. No, he couldn’t fly like Superman, manipulate minds like Professor Xavier or heal like Wolverine. He had a really useful super power: He could read Python regular expressions! For mere mortals regular expressions are write-only collections of control characters and they have a very hard time understanding, let alone analyzing or debugging them. For those of us who don’t have a super hero ready to rescue us damsels in distress, we can use commented regular expressions, as in
2025-07-01 | Why Would Anyone Use COBOL Today?
According to the “Mythical Man-Month” a programmer is more productive in a concise, expressive, and powerful programming language and COBOL is quite the opposite. It is clumsy and verbose. At least, that’s what most people think. I have written two books on iOS programming, one about Objective-C and the next one about Swift. A while ago, my publishing house called me and asked me whether I wanted unsold copies of my books for free. They couldn’t sell them anymore. Why?
2025-06-05 | Trojan Asteroids
An updated version of my “trojan asteroids tutorial” that I initially posted in 1997. Now with update Javascript app!
2025-06-01 | Rely on External Modules or Do It In-House?
In “Ansible Best Practices” Timothy Appnel recommends to use command modules sparingly and shell and command only as a last resort. Instead, you should better use a community-provided module.
2023-08-13 | Breaking Free: How I Ditched Google Services
A few months ago I refactored this site and replace all Google services with either self-hosted alternatives or remove them entirely.