Thoughts by Thomas Derflinger

With the rise of web conferencing and video calls, the need for good audio quality has become more important than ever. This article will give you an overview of the different audio codecs used on the web and how they compare to each other.

Whenever you start learning a new language, you will be confronted with the question of how to learn vocabulary. There are many different approaches to this problem, but one of the most popular is to learn the most common words first. Using my powerful word frequency lists, you can learn the most common words in a foreign language quickly and efficiently.

I love reading books. But I also like to read books on my tablet or my laptop. Using an application like Honkit, you can create great-looking ebooks from markdown files. These ebooks are easy to distribute and can be read using the browser. This article explains how to create ebooks with Honkit.

WebAssembly defines a portable binary-code format for executable programs. It can be used to run languages that support WebAssembly in the browser. Thus, you are no longer restricted to only use JavaScript in the browser. In this article I want to show you which programming languages currently support WebAssembly.

Today the market for architectural CAD (Computer Aided Design) software is mostly closed-source and has a monopolistic structure. A few big companies dominate the market. In this article I want to lay out a vision for an alternative future of an open source ecosystem.

Systemd is great for starting and stopping services under Linux. When you want to start a Python application that uses virtualenv, you need to take special care. This article explains how to create a systemd script using the example of the open source Timetagger Python application.

Checklists can be useful tools to handle the complexities of modern life. Used by pilots and other professions handling complex tasks, checklists can also be useful for software developers. Read more in this article about a quality checklist for publishing NPM packages.

When programming applications that run embedded on a Raspberry Pi, it is often convenient to work on a more powerful machine. In this article I want to show how to edit remotely from a Mac programming code that runs directly on the Raspberry Pi. As a comfortable IDE I use Visual Studio Code.