After working for many years, I assembled some useful advice and templates I always reuse in my projects for writing stable, portable, and readable Bash scripts — Whether you are automating things locally on your local computer running Linux, macOS, or even Windows or remotely, like build processes, cron jobs, and docker builds, most developers will need scripts. However, sometimes it is not simple to find out that scripts fail, or where scripts fail. Therefore, it is…

This is a homage to the terminal. Improve your productivity! I give you a strong motivation to see the use of the command line as a competitive competence. Improve your command line skills and discover a new world. You will be able to do things which are not simply in…

Learn how you can use different randomized sampling techniques for ingesting data streams. — IoT devices produce constant data streams of measurements and logs, which are difficult to analyze in-time. Especially in embedded systems or edge devices, memory and CPU power are too limited for just in time analysis of such streams. …

Over-complexity of a code base can reduce the pace and progress of a developer team; thereby, increasing frustration and stress. In this guide, I put together a list of hints and attitudes to fight unnecessary complexity in software development. — Introduction After over 20 years of working as a software developer, I read and wrote code in many programming languages, like C++, C, C#, R, Python, GO, LISP, Java, Kotlin to name a few. I saw projects succeeding and some failing. Some became stuck, where it was increasingly difficult to add…

Learn how to upload Markdown files to Medium including local images, formulas, cross-references, and bibliography — a scientific, concise workflow. I love writing Markdown at work and for my private projects and my website as well. However, when publishing Markdown files to Medium by copy & paste from my WYSIWYG…

7 reasons to use Markdown for your documentation. Markdown is the least common denominator. It just focuses on text — without any clutter. Software engineering has a lot to do with writing code. …

Origins, side effects, and a cure — Editor’s note: Anxiety can be serious medical condition, while the author has written about anxiety here in relation to code, if you are experiencing real anxiety, please seek medical help. The following article is obviously not medical advice. Why you should delete a lot of source code without fear —…

How to correctly process time in R — dates, times, periods, durations, flux capacitor, time-traveling, and time intervals — what? I give you some help in the time jungle. — Whenever I need to process dates and times in R (and other programming languages) I usually run into difficulties — parsing, printing, time zones, daylight savings, time differences. Probably you are one of those poor wretches like me. So this article is for those and my future self which always…

Why unit testing is really a good idea — even for non-packages. Write tests for creating robust software, save time, and have fun! — You will ask: “Why unit tests? My code is working!”. Unit testing helps to create robust code. After a short motivation what robust code is, I give a survey of the basic unit testing idea. Finally, I show how to use them quickly in R, even for simple scripts (no…