Marius 
This article describes an experiment where I apply acoustic fingerprinting and speech recognition to detect duplicates in my personal collection of episodes (mp3 files) of the German radio play “Philip Maloney”. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches, and present the results of applying the Olaf acoustic fingerprinting implementation. Introduction Acoustic fingerprinting (Wikipedia) … Read more
With PlantUML you can create diagrams as plain text code. This article covers several advanced features, e.g. how to choose the right output file format, or using the include-mechanism effectively. I also explain how you can generate code from PlantUML diagrams (and vice versa), or how to work on a model-layer by extending PlantUML’s syntax. … Read more
With PlantUML you can create diagrams as plain text code. PlantUML takes off the burden so that you don’t need to worry about the looks and layout of your diagram’s elements, by applying opinionated defaults. This article is both a PlantUML layout tutorial, which explains how you can customize the layout, and also explains how … Read more
PlantUML is one of the most feature-complete tools that lets you create diagrams as code, using plain text. It supports UML diagrams and beyond, and has a large ecosystem. In this basic PlantUML tutorial I present an introduction on what PlantUML is and how to learn it. I go into detail about the very useful … Read more
Storing documentation as plain text in version control has numerous advantages, such as the ability to understand changes by diffing, or having documentation next to your code. Since documentation contains text and images, this article explains how diagrams can also be written as plain text, which a generator then converts to graphics. I discuss the … Read more
Writing technical project documentation using proprietary formats like Word, Google Docs or Confluence has numerous disadvantages. Plain text documentation, committed to a VCS like Git, can overcome these disadvantages. This article presents the markup languages Markdown, Asciidoc and reStructured Text used for plain text documentation files, how they compare, and which tools exist to render … Read more
Build runners, which compile and package your software, are often implemented using Docker containers. However, you cannot use Docker if you need a Windows or macOS build runner. This article presents how to create a build runner VM with Vagrant, for Windows and macOS. While the instantiation of a build VM is fully automated, it … Read more
Build runners, which compile and package your software, are often implemented using Docker containers. However, you cannot use Docker if you need a Windows or macOS build runner. This article presents how to create Windows and macOS build runners as virtual machines using Vagrant. While the instantiation of a build VM is fully automated, it … Read more
Data (de-) serialization is about converting between raw data items and instances of your Python classes, in order to transmit or store data. A typical example is the conversion between a Python object and its JSON string representation. This article discusses the two stand-alone frameworks marshmallow and Pydantic, which handle the conversion as well as … Read more
While Python is a dynamically typed language, it is possible to add type hints to your code. This makes code more readable and allows for static analyzers to check your code for type errors, e.g. during development or in a CI pipeline. This article discusses the advantages and drawbacks of static Python type hints in … Read more