Thoughts by Thomas Derflinger

Magic Mirror² is an open source application suitable for creating dashboards for home or business use. It has an extensive ecosystem of third-party plugins to display information from different data sources. In this article I want to show how to set up a dashboard with Magic Mirror² on a Raspberry Pi.

Vue 3 is now the default and recommended version of Vue. It has a number of great improvements that make it more valuable for programmers. So what are the best UI component libraries with support for Vue 3 available today?

Often you need a web interface for your Raspberry Pi projects. Flask is a Python framework that makes it easy to program web APIs. Then you need to add all the deployment steps to automatically run the Flask application. Here I want to show how you can do this with Gunicorn, Nginx and systemd.

With the advent of the new technology of WebAssembly, it is possible to leverage other languages than JavaScript in the browser. Go is one popular language that you can call from your JavaScript web application. This article shows how to do that with TinyGo.

With the proposed flight to Mars and its exploration, there is a long stay required by the astronauts under claustrophobic conditions. Could Virtual Reality (VR) systems alleviate some stress of long stays in space?

Everybody knows the contact forms on website where users can send text message to the website owner. But how could you design a contact form that allows the recording of an audio message? In this article I want to show you how to do that.

Underground agriculture is an emerging field of agriculture that has the potential to help solve a big part of the current ecological crisis. How this can be achieved I want to explain in this article.

Netlify Functions are serverless code that are easy to deploy. Here I want to show how to program a simple Netlify Function to send a contact message from my web site to an email address and log it into an Airtable sheet.

The construction industry's value stands at 11 trillion USD worldwide in 2020. It is an important industry, but it is slow to embrace modern technology. How could the property industry become more open?

Often you need to record audio on a mobile device and send it to a server for further processing. In this article, I show you how to do that with React Native and Flask.

MDX allows you to write JSX in Markdown documents. You can embed these components in your document. In this article, I show how to configure your Next.js application to work with MDX.

Many websites need to visualize data in charts. This article compares three of the most popular open source charting libraries (Chart.js, Plotly.js and ECharts) from the perspective of the software developer.

GitLab is a popular git-focused DevOps platform. Netlify is cloud computing startup that offers to host your static site. In this article I show how to configure the GitLab build pipeline to deploy to a Netlify project.

The Americas were the frontier for European settlers during much of the 15th to 19th century. Today everything seems to be explored and settled. But looking closer, one can identify five modern frontiers that are worth discovering.

Conventional Commits is a specification for writing standardized git commit messages. This article is about how to use conventional commits conveniently in Visual Studio Code.

Cypress is a popular tool for end-to-end testing for web applications. Often you want to be sure you did not forget console messages or did not introduce errors in your final application. This article shows how to test for that in Cypress.

LitElement is a Web Component library by Google. It succeeds the Polymer library and strives for speed and compatibility with the Web Components standard. How to integrate LitElements into your React application and use event handling, I want to show in this article.

Octave is a free and open source scientific computing platform. It is especially suited for mathematical operations and has a simple mechanism to plot the data. Trigonometry visualizations are especially powerful with Octave.

For every serious web application, you should choose a component library. This article compares Material UI, Fluent UI React, Ant Design, React Spectrum and Semantic UI React.

Interactive maps on the web are a great way to visualize information. How to create an interactive outline map with React of the city of Munich I want to show in this article.

In every responsive web project, you need media queries to adapt to different screen sizes. Styled components are a popular way to write CSS styles in React applications. This article proposes a way to write media queries with the styled components library Emotion.

Social distancing has shaped an increase in usage of remote working tools. One such tool is Jitsi video conferencing. In this article, I want to describe how easy it is to spin up a free video conferencing server.

With Gatsby, you can generate a static website that works great with cloud storage solutions like Google Cloud Storage. How to configure Gatsby and use Infrastructure as Code tools like Terraform I want to show in this article.

When you use Vue for your project, there is a great chance that Nuxt can improve your experience significantly. By using Nuxt you get all the benefits of the Vue ecosystem plus some significant enhancements that I want to highlight in this article.

Quickly building a shop for digital goods on an e-commerce website is important for many merchants. Using Snipcart and the CMS Gatsby allow us to integrate a shop fast.

The Arduino IDE contains a simplified language for developing for the Arduino platform. Common input and output operations are simplified making the environment ideal for prototyping for designers and makers. But sometimes you want to program in "real" C and use the AVR toolchain directly.

As the world grows more and more globalized, companies are looking for a uniform identity across their markets. Thus, the demand for fonts that shine and offer the same harmony across languages and scripts (writing systems) is increasing.

Markdown is a popular format for online content due to its easy syntax. Now you can create interactive content using React components in markdown with MDX. In this article, I show how to use MDX with a React application to render an interactive chart with Recharts in a markdown file.

Serverless is a framework for building and deploying serverless code. Provisioning and scaling is automatically handled by the cloud provider. This tutorial will show how to write a function that sends an email with contact information. This is a popular use case for contact forms on websites.

Bootstrap is a hugely popular frontend framework. Looking behind the scenes of Boostrap unveils its heavy reliance on Sass, a CSS language. This article shows some internals of Boostrap with a focus on the button component and the build environment.

Many web applications need a login solution. This repetitive task can be made easier with Login Daal. Login Daal is an open source login solution written in JavaScript. It contains responsive screen designs and a mock backend server.

DevOps skills are becoming more important for NodeJS developers. With Ansible, you can configure your cloud servers automatically. NodeJS is a popular JavaScript server platfrom. How to install a CentOS Linux server with NodeJS and Nginx using Ansible I want to show in this article.

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool by HashiCorp. Using it you can reproducibly create server instances on cloud providers like AWS or Digital Ocean. In this article I show you how to create an AWS EC2 Spot instance server with Terraform.

A-Frame is a VR (Virtual Reality) framework written in JavaScript, developed by Mozilla. It runs in the browser and can display interactive 3D scenes in your VR device. How to build a VR website of a rotating sculpture with A-Frame I want to show in this article.

Modern cities already have parts of their infrastructure underground. Some people live today underground for work or out of necessity. Where are people living inside the earth, and how will the development of underground cities be in the future?

GatsbyJS is a fast static Content Management System (CMS). It can be individually extended by anybody knowing a bit of JavaScript and React. Since podcasts are undergoing a revival, this article shows how to self-host podcast audio files on your GatsbyJS website.

Having an Express REST API is great, but you need to teach other developers how to properly use it. This is the mission of the OpenAPI documentation specification for REST APIs.

What if we could connect the entire earth's biosphere with the web? This would enable us to empathize more with the world's creatures.

The ml5.js library makes it easy for JavaScript developers to integrate machine learning (ML) in their web application. In this article I show you how to easily recognize a bison with AI.