Hi there,

I'm Nikolas Martens, freelancing Software Engineer, and this is my blog. I hope it contains something interesting for you. Enjoy the read!

DPC 2015

Wed 01 July 2015 in talks

Last weekend I had the extraordinary pleasure of presenting my talk on Template Animation at the Dutch PHP Conference. If you happened to attend: thanks for showing up although it was the first slot after the social event =) and also: I'd appreciate your feedback.

The conference was extremely well organized …

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Computer Revolution

Fri 06 March 2015 in zells

I just came across Chris Granger's essay "Coding is not the new literacy" and although I strongly agree with his overall notion, I disagree with his premise "Being literate isn't simply a matter of being able to put words on the page, it's solidifying our thoughts such that they …

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Building web applications with watoki

Thu 05 March 2015 in programming

I've been working for about a year now on a project named web application tool kit (short watoki) and thought if I ever want anybody besides me to use it, I better write about how.

watoki a collection of libraries that provide infrastructure commonly needed by …

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Tool Tyranny

Wed 15 October 2014 in programming

So Richard McIntyre (aka mackstar) created a BDD tool named ShouldIT (video) which led to a discussion between him and Konstantin Kudryashov (aka everzet), mostly comparing ShouldIT to Cucumber/Behat. For example in this gist.

Guess I'm jumping kinda late on the bandwagon here but I wanted to add my …

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Specification by Example

Thu 11 September 2014 in programming

In a previous post I argued against a testing monoculture and suggested to mix tests with different levels of integration. Since UI tests cannot test the system completey, but unit tests are often times too fine-grained to justify their investment, staying away from these extremes is often times the best …

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