Many topics are interesting enough to spend some time exploring and playing around with them. While not all of them end up being used for other projects, some of them are added to the regular bag of tricks. Some of them are finally used as a building block in the “way things should (or could) happen”.

This site lists such knowledge, findings, (pet) projects and is in itself part of the ‘tricks of the trade’ used to perform useful things in the digital age.

Topics of Interest

Building software

Build covers the process of turning a (human) developer’s result (source code) into executing program(s). ‘Executing’ is notably different from ‘executable’ and includes the issue of putting the programs to actually work - not just ‘theoretically available’.

The observation (and frustration) is that developer productivity is still very low from a user’s point of view, measured in the time elapsed between uttering a wish and starting to work with the result.

Any technology that helps to automate steps in the process fall into this category, including git, gradle, automated testing, DevOps deployment etc.

Data-Driven Apps

Data-Driven Apps cover a wide-spread class of applications that repeatedly is hard to understand to non-technical folks why so much effort is (still) required for seemingly small changes.

The current state of the art assumption for such applications is:

  • web-based access = no installation, no update issues (for users at least, if not to the operators as well)
  • simple business requirements are quickly (and safely) added, like ‘adding a field’ or ‘changing the field layout’ or ‘adding a link from one record to another’ etc.
  • most likely written in a dynamic language to enable smooth configuration and customizing
  • using a plain database with a human-readable table structure
  • offering an API (Rest/HTTP/JSON) to integrate with other applications

… etc.

Technologies in this area include Odoo and generally, Meta-Modeling, App-Frameworks and Scripting languages.