Blog@rtens.org

Reaching your Goals with Cybernetics

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 10 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0100

I've recently been thinking about a lot about how to set, track and reach goals. Privately, as well as professionally. And I wanted to share a couple of thoughts, which just happened to come out in dialogue form. So here we go.

What's your goal?

I want to go running …

Bhutan Last Part

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

It's been almost three years now since I returned from my visit to the Himalayas. The whole time I wanted to finish this series, write about the rest of my time there. But as so often, something got in the way.

So apologies for mostly describing pictures now owed to …

A Time System for the Space Age

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 03 May 2018 00:00:00 +0200

I used last Christmas break to watch "The Expanse" which quickly became my favorite SciFi series with its incredibly realistic and inspirational vision of a humanity that has colonized the solar system. And it was one sentence in this show that struck an unexpected chord with me. It was a …

Everyone Should be Software Literate

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 25 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0200

The YouTube recommendation algorithm recently put a video titled "Not Everyone Should Code" on my home screen and I got curious. Mostly concentrating on why everybody should become software literate for the last years, I wanted to know what their arguments against would be.

First off: it's a great video …

On Principles

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 16 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0200

In high school, I was oftentimes mocked for caring too much about principles. Saying things like "This is against my principles" or "I'm doing this out of principle" earns you quite bit of ridicule from fellow teenagers. And even today, I still get scoffed at when I'm one of the …

DPC 2017

Nikolas Martens — Fri, 30 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0200

For my last conference of 2017 I travelled, as for the first of this year, to Amsterday to talk about Specification by Example (aka Behaviour-Driven Development) and the Dutch PHP Conference. I used to opportunity to revise the presentation and slides which you can find here.

Update: A video of …

IPC 2017

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 30 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

I was very happy to get the opportunity to talk about Rapid Prototyping with Domain-Driven Design at the International PHP Conference in Berlin. You can find the revised version of my slides here. Unfortunately my agenda didn't allow me to attend many of the sessions but it was great meeting …

GPN 2017

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 25 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

The Gulaschprogrammiernacht (GPN) was my first deliberate journey into the hacker community and I have since been working hard on forgiving myself for not having gone every single year before. It was great fun just randomly talkin to people about their ideas and projects, trying out more VR headsets, playing …

Codemotion Amsterdam 2017

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 16 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

My first conference of 2017 brought me to my new favourite city, Amsterdam. There is very litte beating sitting at the canals on a warm May evening with a cold beer and good conversations.

So thanks to Codemotion for yet again organizing an excellent event and giving me the opportunity …

Essential Complexity is Essential

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 11 May 2017 00:00:00 +0200

(This article was featured on the blog of the International PHP Conference)

The premise of my talk "Rapid Prototyping with Domain-Driven Design" is that the two greatest foes of every software developer are a) uncertainty and b) complexity. Over the years, we have invented many tools and methods to fight …

Flaccid Democracy

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0100

I must confess I was never much interested in politics, and therefore very grateful when I found the Wahl-o-mat which freed me from having to read the party platforms myself. I always viewed non-politic civic participation as the more effective, certainly more efficient way for changing society and have been …

More than Machines

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0100

My opinion is probably more than a bit biased, but to me computers are incredible. Almost magical even. Like daemons from another sphere, all it takes is the right spell, and it will do your bidding (and like with these daemons, you have to be very careful which exact words …

Code and Bicycles

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0100

One of the most inspiring texts that I've ever read is Bret Victor's What can a technologist do about climate change. Before reading it, I was always a bit ashamed of not working directly on this most urgent and extensive problem of humanity. Instead of working on alternative energy sources …

A Unified Computing Model

Nikolas Martens — Mon, 28 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0100

In 1963, while working at the Advanced Research Project Agency, J.C.R. Licklider wrote in his Memorandum to the Members and Affiliates of the Intergalatic Computer Network:

At this extreme, the problem is essentially the one discussed by science fiction writers: "how do you get communications started among totally …

Codemotion Milan 2016

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 26 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0100

My Codemotion spree of this year ended in the beautiful city of Milan. I was quite impressed by the sheer amount of talks and speaker and even more of their quality. Unfortunately I could only attend a few since I arrived during the first day and decided that my own …

Wrong way driver

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 22 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Maybe I'm just a cynic and maybe this is just a rant but I think software development nowadays su... I'm highly discontent with the way software development is done. To be more specific, I've listed a bunch of incidental complications that make programming unnecessarily hard along with ideas how they …

Codemotion Berlin 2016

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 26 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0200

To get to this month's conference I didn't need plane nor train but could easily walk the couple of hundred meters to Codemotion in the Kulturbrauerei. And not only that was new but also my talk on Prototyping with Domain-Driven Design.

You can find the slides here and there is …

Codemotion Warsaw 2016

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 17 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting my talk on Specification by Example (aka Behaviour-Driven Development) in an actual cinema at the Codemotion conference in Warsaw. You can find the slides here from when I gave it in Rome two years ago.

Why even casual programming is hard

Nikolas Martens — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 00:00:00 +0200

When I was searching yesterday for "what makes programming hard", none of the results really resonated with me. All pieces were about why it is hard to become a professional software developer. Most people seem to view programming as an all-in activity. Either you're in for the big win (a …

Bhutan Part Three

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 24 May 2016 00:00:00 +0200

Only little more than a month to go. Time for an update. I'll try to make this one quick.

This article is part of a series. Check out the other ones if you haven't yet.

Thimphu

So what's been going on in the big small city? Well for once there …

Bhutan Part Two

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Somehow I thought that time would slow down a bit if I move to such a different place. But it didn't. Not a bit. A third of my time in Bhutan is already over - 121 days to go, 61 down.

So I guess it's about time that I update this …

The Problem with Money

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0100

For a long time I've been having the faint feeling, that something is fundamentally wrong with money. With the way it's created, the way it's used, the way it drives our actions. I could never quite put my finger on it but the feeling was always there when I thought …

Bhutan Part One

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 17 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Two weeks ago, I packed my bags, got on a plane and flew to the small kingdom Bhutan in south-east Asia, where I'm gonna stay for the next six months. So mostly for keeping track of my time here myself, I want to write about it every once in a …

Science-Driven Development

Nikolas Martens — Mon, 14 Dec 2015 00:00:00 +0100

Ever once in a while everything seems to fall into place and suddenly the connection between previously unconnected dots becomes obvious. During the last couple of days, I've had such a moment. In this article I describe the reasoning behind my conclusion that The Lean Start-Up, Agile Development, Specification by …

FrOSCon 2015

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0200

Last weekend, it was the 10 years anniversary of FrOSCon and I got the chance to present "The pyramid is a lie" - a talk about multi-level testing inspired by Konstantin Kudryashov's talk Modelling by Example. You can find the slides here and you can rate the talk here.

As …

DPC 2015

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 01 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0200

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 …

Computer Revolution

Nikolas Martens — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0100

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 …

Building web applications with watoki

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0100

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 …

Tool Tyranny

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0200

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 …

Specification by Example

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0200

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 …

FrOSCon 2014

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 24 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0200

I was invited at this years FrOSCon to speak about executable documentation which is sort of follow-up to last year where I spoke about Specficiation by Example (aka Behavior-Driven Development) and how to use automated tests to create a self-validating documentation of a software application. This year I approached the …

Polyamorous TDD

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 26 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Three things happened during the last week that each increased my urge to write this article. The coincidence is almost uncanny.

Monday: over the easter weekend I finally built a tool I've been meaning to build for over a year.
Tuesday: I became responsible for releasing and quality of my …

Codemotion 2014 Rome

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 17 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0200

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting my talk on Specification by Example (aka Behaviour-Driven Development) at the Codemotion conference in Rome in front of a very attentive and responsive audience.

You can find the slides here and some pics here and here. Thanks for those!

The talks I …

The Assembler Excursion

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 08 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0100

Last week we went oldschool at our monthly Coding Dojo and programmed in Assembler for the 6502 microprocessor thanks to an awesome tutorial by Nick Morgan that made me wanna try it out myself. Turned out it's a lot harder than we thought and we achieved little more during the …

Small Steps (sudoku edition)

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0100

After trying out live coding at the October meeting of the Berlin PHP user group last year, I tasted blood. So I decided to repeat it with a more complex problem.

At that point I remembered some articles discussing the pros and cons of TDD in the context of a …

Codemotion 2013 Madrid

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

On the last weekend I had the opportunity to present my talk about Specification by Example (aka Behaviour-Driven Development) at the Codemotion conference in Madrid.

You can find the commented slides here and thanks for the awesome feeback!

Unfortunately I could only stay one night because of other commitments so …

Small steps at bephpug

Nikolas Martens — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0200

At the Berlin PHP user group last week I had two "firsts". It was my first time live-coding and I thought while I'm at it I could also do a "live" presentation on my hybrid tablet/netbook. Both went surprisingly well. And thanks guys for all your feedback.

The talk …

Froscon 2013

Nikolas Martens — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Last weekend I had the pleasure of talking about Specification by Example at the Free and Open Source Software Conference near Bonn. You can find the commented slides about Specification by Example here. If you watched the talk, I would appreciate your feedback here.

I used the opportunity to finally …

TDD Case Study

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0200

I'm a big fan of Test-Driven Development and have been using it in almost all projects for a while now with astonishing results. If you are not convinced by TDD, drop me a line and I will do my best to change that. Although at first seemingly counter-intuitive, TDD quickly …

Codemotion 2013

Nikolas Martens — Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Last Friday I had the pleasure of talking about Template Animation and my implementation of it at codemotion Berlin. You can find the slides here. Being my first talk at a conference it was quite an adventure and big fun.

Although some talks inevitably turned out to be of the …

DI - push or pull

Nikolas Martens — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

Dependency Injection is a must-have for testable code - and please write me if you are no convinced of testability. I even wrote my own simple Dependency Injection Container recently out of pure joy on experimenting. But there is one tiny thing that I can't make up my mind about when …

Developer skills

Nikolas Martens — Sat, 13 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

While I'm not a fan of certifications and the sort, it's definitely helpful for a novice developer to have a scale to measure himself against. Something that answers the question "what do I need to learn?"

The guys from clean-code-developer.de do a decent job of defining stages and methods …

Blogging with pelican and git

Nikolas Martens — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

If it wasn't for pelican, this blog would probably not exist. So here is a brief description on the why and what and how.

Step 1: engine

The spark that got this blog going was my colleague showing me pelican yesterday which is a static blog generator written in python …

It's a start

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0200

I realized that I regularly write logs for myself for keepsake. But they mostly turn out too short and cryptic to understand - given that I actually find them again. So I guess this blog is mostly for myself, but who knows - maybe someone else might find this stuff interesting.

My …

Valencia

Nikolas Martens — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0200

I wrote (in German) about my time studying in Valencia. Thought I'd link it here.

off-to-vlc.blogspot.com