Manuel Almagro Rivas

Manuel Almagro Rivas

Integration consultant, physicist by training, and general tech enthusiast. Based in Granada (Spain). Interested in cooking, literature, languages and films.

Posts by Tags

AI

On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window

22 minute read

Published:

I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.

API

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

CDC

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

Debezium

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

Docker

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

Fortran

The Game of Life

1 minute read

Published:

John Conway’s famous Game of Life is a “zero player game”, as he calls it. There exists a great deal of literature exploring the intricacies that can emerge from its very simple rules. Citing Wikipedia:

Groovy

Storing structured data in SAP Integration Suite exchange properties

1 minute read

Published:

Most Integration Suite flows treat exchange properties as simple containers: a string, a number, sometimes a raw XML blob. But they can hold structured objects too (Groovy maps, lists, parsed JSON) and a simple content modifier can read individual values from them directly, without another script. This results in cleaner, easier to maintain iflows that actually execute faster, because there is no need to re-parse anything. Let’s see an example.

Integration

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

Integration Suite

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

Kafka

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

MariaDB

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

Python

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

R

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach

4 minute read

Published:

Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!

Exporting your FilmAffinity profile to a .csv file using R.

5 minute read

Published:

Updated May 14th 2024: the code stopped working after FilmAffinity changed the way ratings are shown. A small change in the code was needed to take this into consideration. Thanks to those who emailed me about it!

Happy pRide!

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Here’s a fun way to generate the pride flag using one (long) line of R code.

Making animations in R.

9 minute read

Published:

Animating the results of a simulation comes in handy very frequently, especially when one wants to check the evolution of a system. Even though R does not have native tools especially desiged to generate .gif files, it can be easily done by putting a few lines of code together. To illustrate this, I’ll show the steps to create a simple animation, but keep in mind that the process can be modified to make more complex animations. (There’s nothing a quick Google search won’t give away when it comes to making an R plot look prettier). The full code for this example is available at the end of this post, but I want to explain every bit first to make it clear. Let’s start.

The Game of Life

1 minute read

Published:

John Conway’s famous Game of Life is a “zero player game”, as he calls it. There exists a great deal of literature exploring the intricacies that can emerge from its very simple rules. Citing Wikipedia:

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

Studying emoji usage through geolocation.

1 minute read

Published:

Andalucía, the southernmost community in peninsular Spain, just celebrated its regional holiday. Every 28th of February, students all over Andalucía gather in their playgrounds and eat the much-celebrated “panaceite”: a slice of bread with locally made olive oil, as well as stuff like chocolate, sugar or green beans. People wish each other a happy day on social media, but there’s a (very unimportant) problem: the Andalusian flag does not exist in emoji form. The flag, which consists of three green-white-green horizontal stripes, looks really similar to the Nigerian flag, the only relevant difference being the vertical disposition of the latter. But that does not seem to be a problem for most.

REST API

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

SAP

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

Storing structured data in SAP Integration Suite exchange properties

1 minute read

Published:

Most Integration Suite flows treat exchange properties as simple containers: a string, a number, sometimes a raw XML blob. But they can hold structured objects too (Groovy maps, lists, parsed JSON) and a simple content modifier can read individual values from them directly, without another script. This results in cleaner, easier to maintain iflows that actually execute faster, because there is no need to re-parse anything. Let’s see an example.

SAP BTP

Storing structured data in SAP Integration Suite exchange properties

1 minute read

Published:

Most Integration Suite flows treat exchange properties as simple containers: a string, a number, sometimes a raw XML blob. But they can hold structured objects too (Groovy maps, lists, parsed JSON) and a simple content modifier can read individual values from them directly, without another script. This results in cleaner, easier to maintain iflows that actually execute faster, because there is no need to re-parse anything. Let’s see an example.

SAP Integration Suite

Storing structured data in SAP Integration Suite exchange properties

1 minute read

Published:

Most Integration Suite flows treat exchange properties as simple containers: a string, a number, sometimes a raw XML blob. But they can hold structured objects too (Groovy maps, lists, parsed JSON) and a simple content modifier can read individual values from them directly, without another script. This results in cleaner, easier to maintain iflows that actually execute faster, because there is no need to re-parse anything. Let’s see an example.

SOAP

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

SOAP API

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

Shiny

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach

4 minute read

Published:

Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!

Streamlit

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

WSDL

SOAP Blueprint, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love WSDLs

8 minute read

Published:

If you have ever had to write a WSDL file by hand, you know that the experience sits somewhere between filling in a tax form and defusing a bomb. One misplaced namespace, one wrong nesting style, and the consuming system rejects the whole thing with an error message that tells you absolutely nothing useful. If that consuming system happens to be SAP, the error messages may get even more cryptic and they come individually, even though there are ways of knowing where the problems lay. Furthermore, the documentation on what WSDL structure SAP actually expects is a mixture of tribal knowledge and a bunch of SAP Notes.

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

apple

Some useful customizations for macOS.

4 minute read

Published:

I started using a Mac back in 2018. My computer, an fairly standard HP laptop I’d bought back in 2013, was beginning to become a source of troubles. The charger wouldn’t charge, the keyboard wouldn’t hold the keys in place, and generally the computer wouldn’t compute. This was a problem, given that I was a destitute student. To my surprise, older MacBooks (the white poylycarbonate MacBooks made back in 2010) where dirt cheap, even when bought from overseas and thus with shipping and custom costs included in the price. I bought one for about 130€. It lacked the Euro (€) key and I couldn’t type words containing an ñ directly, but it felt like a small inconvenience and I quickly found workarounds. That little laptop proved hardy and powerful enough for my daily tasks, and it carried me through a computational physics course during which the rubber in the bottom peeled due to the excessive heat emanating from its dying processor. It was a pretty nice machine.

automation

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

cellular automata

The Game of Life

1 minute read

Published:

John Conway’s famous Game of Life is a “zero player game”, as he calls it. There exists a great deal of literature exploring the intricacies that can emerge from its very simple rules. Citing Wikipedia:

classical mechanics

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

collision implementation

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

consulting

On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window

22 minute read

Published:

I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.

curiousity

Studying emoji usage through geolocation.

1 minute read

Published:

Andalucía, the southernmost community in peninsular Spain, just celebrated its regional holiday. Every 28th of February, students all over Andalucía gather in their playgrounds and eat the much-celebrated “panaceite”: a slice of bread with locally made olive oil, as well as stuff like chocolate, sugar or green beans. People wish each other a happy day on social media, but there’s a (very unimportant) problem: the Andalusian flag does not exist in emoji form. The flag, which consists of three green-white-green horizontal stripes, looks really similar to the Nigerian flag, the only relevant difference being the vertical disposition of the latter. But that does not seem to be a problem for most.

customizations

Some useful customizations for macOS.

4 minute read

Published:

I started using a Mac back in 2018. My computer, an fairly standard HP laptop I’d bought back in 2013, was beginning to become a source of troubles. The charger wouldn’t charge, the keyboard wouldn’t hold the keys in place, and generally the computer wouldn’t compute. This was a problem, given that I was a destitute student. To my surprise, older MacBooks (the white poylycarbonate MacBooks made back in 2010) where dirt cheap, even when bought from overseas and thus with shipping and custom costs included in the price. I bought one for about 130€. It lacked the Euro (€) key and I couldn’t type words containing an ñ directly, but it felt like a small inconvenience and I quickly found workarounds. That little laptop proved hardy and powerful enough for my daily tasks, and it carried me through a computational physics course during which the rubber in the bottom peeled due to the excessive heat emanating from its dying processor. It was a pretty nice machine.

data mining

Studying emoji usage through geolocation.

1 minute read

Published:

Andalucía, the southernmost community in peninsular Spain, just celebrated its regional holiday. Every 28th of February, students all over Andalucía gather in their playgrounds and eat the much-celebrated “panaceite”: a slice of bread with locally made olive oil, as well as stuff like chocolate, sugar or green beans. People wish each other a happy day on social media, but there’s a (very unimportant) problem: the Andalusian flag does not exist in emoji form. The flag, which consists of three green-white-green horizontal stripes, looks really similar to the Nigerian flag, the only relevant difference being the vertical disposition of the latter. But that does not seem to be a problem for most.

data visualization

Happy pRide!

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Here’s a fun way to generate the pride flag using one (long) line of R code.

Making animations in R.

9 minute read

Published:

Animating the results of a simulation comes in handy very frequently, especially when one wants to check the evolution of a system. Even though R does not have native tools especially desiged to generate .gif files, it can be easily done by putting a few lines of code together. To illustrate this, I’ll show the steps to create a simple animation, but keep in mind that the process can be modified to make more complex animations. (There’s nothing a quick Google search won’t give away when it comes to making an R plot look prettier). The full code for this example is available at the end of this post, but I want to explain every bit first to make it clear. Let’s start.

Studying emoji usage through geolocation.

1 minute read

Published:

Andalucía, the southernmost community in peninsular Spain, just celebrated its regional holiday. Every 28th of February, students all over Andalucía gather in their playgrounds and eat the much-celebrated “panaceite”: a slice of bread with locally made olive oil, as well as stuff like chocolate, sugar or green beans. People wish each other a happy day on social media, but there’s a (very unimportant) problem: the Andalusian flag does not exist in emoji form. The flag, which consists of three green-white-green horizontal stripes, looks really similar to the Nigerian flag, the only relevant difference being the vertical disposition of the latter. But that does not seem to be a problem for most.

docker

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

event-driven

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

for fun

Happy pRide!

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Here’s a fun way to generate the pride flag using one (long) line of R code.

The Game of Life

1 minute read

Published:

John Conway’s famous Game of Life is a “zero player game”, as he calls it. There exists a great deal of literature exploring the intricacies that can emerge from its very simple rules. Citing Wikipedia:

fortran

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

fun

Making animations in R.

9 minute read

Published:

Animating the results of a simulation comes in handy very frequently, especially when one wants to check the evolution of a system. Even though R does not have native tools especially desiged to generate .gif files, it can be easily done by putting a few lines of code together. To illustrate this, I’ll show the steps to create a simple animation, but keep in mind that the process can be modified to make more complex animations. (There’s nothing a quick Google search won’t give away when it comes to making an R plot look prettier). The full code for this example is available at the end of this post, but I want to explain every bit first to make it clear. Let’s start.

integration

Stop asking, start listening: a case for event-driven database integration

15 minute read

Published:

In many custom-built data replication and integration setups, a common pattern appears: a scheduled job queries a database every few minutes (or every hour, or every night), picks up whatever has changed since the last run, and feeds that data into another system. It works, it is simple to reason about, and for plenty of applications it is good enough.

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

Storing structured data in SAP Integration Suite exchange properties

1 minute read

Published:

Most Integration Suite flows treat exchange properties as simple containers: a string, a number, sometimes a raw XML blob. But they can hold structured objects too (Groovy maps, lists, parsed JSON) and a simple content modifier can read individual values from them directly, without another script. This results in cleaner, easier to maintain iflows that actually execute faster, because there is no need to re-parse anything. Let’s see an example.

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

lab work

PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach

4 minute read

Published:

Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!

macOS

Some useful customizations for macOS.

4 minute read

Published:

I started using a Mac back in 2018. My computer, an fairly standard HP laptop I’d bought back in 2013, was beginning to become a source of troubles. The charger wouldn’t charge, the keyboard wouldn’t hold the keys in place, and generally the computer wouldn’t compute. This was a problem, given that I was a destitute student. To my surprise, older MacBooks (the white poylycarbonate MacBooks made back in 2010) where dirt cheap, even when bought from overseas and thus with shipping and custom costs included in the price. I bought one for about 130€. It lacked the Euro (€) key and I couldn’t type words containing an ñ directly, but it felt like a small inconvenience and I quickly found workarounds. That little laptop proved hardy and powerful enough for my daily tasks, and it carried me through a computational physics course during which the rubber in the bottom peeled due to the excessive heat emanating from its dying processor. It was a pretty nice machine.

personal

On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window

22 minute read

Published:

I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.

programming

On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window

22 minute read

Published:

I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.

protein analysis

PAULA: Protein Analysis Using a Least-squares Approach

4 minute read

Published:

Last year, I took a physical chemistry class which had to do with the behaviour and analysis of biomolecules (mainly proteins and nucleic acids). It was fun to step outside of my comfort zone and being in a chemistry lab again, and I had a great deal of fun learning about bio-stuff again. The course worked by alternating theory classes (where we learned the formal aspects of the techniques we would later apply) and lab sessions. We were given a small sample of the problem molecule which we wanted to characterise over a period of two-or-so months, which in this case was hen egg-white lysozyme, a cheap and common protein. One goal was to pass polarised ultraviolet light through a sample of this protein, and measure how well the protein is able to twist the plane of the incident light rays. This technique is called far-ultraviolet circular dychroism, and it turns out that learning about the way a protein interacts with these particular wavelengths in this very particular sense yields a great deal of information about its structure!

python

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

reflection

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.

sap

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

scientific animation

Making animations in R.

9 minute read

Published:

Animating the results of a simulation comes in handy very frequently, especially when one wants to check the evolution of a system. Even though R does not have native tools especially desiged to generate .gif files, it can be easily done by putting a few lines of code together. To illustrate this, I’ll show the steps to create a simple animation, but keep in mind that the process can be modified to make more complex animations. (There’s nothing a quick Google search won’t give away when it comes to making an R plot look prettier). The full code for this example is available at the end of this post, but I want to explain every bit first to make it clear. Let’s start.

shortcuts

Where is that plane going? A shortcut for plane-spotters

5 minute read

Published:

A friend of mine has a curious habit: whenever she sees a plane in the sky, she immediately checks Flightradar24 to find out where it’s headed and where it came from. It turns out (perhaps unsurprisingly for those in the industry) all sorts of things happen in the sky. There are hot-air balloons for tourists, law enforcement aircraft, pilots in training, commercial flights, military planes… and somehow, all of them are tracked on Flightradar24.

simulations

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

software engineering

On Naur, vibe coding, and the people you can’t replace with a context window

22 minute read

Published:

I read Peter Naur’s Programming as Theory Building this week. It is from 1985, and it argues something that I find more relevant now than it has been in decades: that what programmers build is not really code, but a theory of the problem they are solving. The code is a side effect. The theory lives in the heads of the people who built the system, and when those people leave, the theory leaves with them. Documentation does not save you. The code does not save you. You can read every line of a system written by someone else and still not have what they had.

streamlit

Automatic AS-IS reports in SAP Integration Suite.

3 minute read

Published:

When you work with SAP Integration Suite, you quickly realize that the hard part isn’t always building new interfaces. It’s understanding what’s already there. Over time, integration packages pile up, documentation gets stale, and nobody really knows the real, up-to-date state of the integration landscape.

verlet integration

Newtonian mechanics and Verlet integration.

2 minute read

Published:

I have recently been dealing with Verlet integration as part of the curriculum of one of my classes. While I won’t cover the details here, I will eventually upload all the code to my GitHub account.

web scraping

Exporting your FilmAffinity profile to a .csv file using R.

5 minute read

Published:

Updated May 14th 2024: the code stopped working after FilmAffinity changed the way ratings are shown. A small change in the code was needed to take this into consideration. Thanks to those who emailed me about it!

webservice

On using wrong tools

5 minute read

Published:

About two years ago I bought an AirTag. I usually go days without driving, so I end up not being sure about where my car is parked. The AirTag is a simple solution for this: I left it in my glovebox and now I can check my car’s location, almost live, in my phone.