19 articles tagged with culture

Little Helpers

Yesterday I couldn't help but feel a sense of awe at all the conveniences modern life has to offer. A lot of the chores in our household are taken care of by little helpers: The dishwasher washes the dishes, the washing machine washes the clothes, and the robot vacuum cleaner cleans the floors. The … More »

The Uber of Poland

A few years ago I visited a friend in Gdańsk, Poland. As we explored the city, one thing I noticed was that cabs were relatively expensive and there was no Uber. Instead, most (young) people used a community-organized service called Night Riders. I couldn't find anything about that service on the we… More »

Hackers' Folklore

Some computer terms have a surprising legacy. Many of them are derived from long-obsolete technologies. This post tries to dust off the exciting history of some of these terms that we use every day but aren't quite sure about their origins. Let's jump right in! Bike-Shed… More »

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Excel Macros

I never was a big fan of internships, partially because all the exciting companies were far away from my little village in Bavaria and partially because I was too shy to apply. Only once I applied for an internship in Ireland as part of a school program. Our teacher assigned the jobs and so my friend got one at Apple and I ended up at a medium-sized IT distributor — let's call them PcGo. More »

That Octocat on the Wall

So I'm in a bit of a sentimental mood lately. Github got acquired by Microsoft. While I think the acquisition was well-deserved, I still wish it didn't happen. Let me explain. More »

Ten Years of Vim

When I opened Vim by accident for the first time, I thought it was broken. My keystrokes changed the screen in unpredictable ways, and I wanted to undo things and quit. Needless to say, it was an unpleasant experience. There was something about it though, that kept me coming back and it became my main editor. Fast forward ten years (!) and I still use Vim. Why is that? More »

Modern Day Annoyances - Digital Clocks

This morning I woke up to the beeping noise of our oven's alarm clock. The reason was that I tried to correct the oven's local time the day before — and I pushed the wrong buttons. As a result I didn't set the correct time, instead, I set a cooking timer... and that's what woke me up today. More »

Learn Some Rust During Hacktoberfest

October is the perfect time to contribute to Open Source — at least according to Github and DigitalOcean. Because that's when they organize Hacktoberfest, a global event where you get a free shirt and lots of street cred for creating pull requests. More »

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