Dr. Nils Blum-Oeste

About me

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0200

Hi, I’m Nils, an AI-native engineering leader with 6+ years leading engineering teams and 15+ years building at the intersection of AI, data and complex systems, most of it remote. I founded and led the first AI team at Pitch, and at Phaidra grew from leading a single AI team to running a 30+ person engineering org, building teams from scratch and evolving the organization as it scaled. And I still ship agentic systems myself, every day.

MotoFlow - Ride Tracking for Motorcyclists

Sun, 11 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I released MotoFlow in 2025 - a native Apple app for motorcycle ride tracking. As a rider myself, I built the app I always wanted but couldn’t find.

MotoFlow runs natively on iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac. The macOS app is a full native Mac application for managing your ride library, browsing routes on a large screen, and integrating photos that automatically map to your journeys. One-tap recording on iPhone or Apple Watch, then review and organize everything on your Mac.

DrumFlow - Virtual Handpan & Tongue Drum

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2025 I built and released DrumFlow - a pattern generator for handpan and tongue drum players on iPhone and iPad.

I got into handpan music a while ago and found myself constantly looking for new patterns and rhythms to try. The problem with random generation is that it usually sounds terrible - just notes without musical coherence. So I built something that generates patterns using motif-based composition: it creates a short musical phrase and develops it, producing rhythms that actually sound good and work well with the instrument.

MotoFlow Support

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:27:22 +0100

Need a hand with MotoFlow? My name is Nils, the motorcycle enthusiast behind this app and I have got you covered, rider to rider.

Before reaching out, you might find your answer in our FAQ section or Privacy Policy.

Contact Me

Just send me an email with any question or suggestion you have, or if you just want to have a chat!

Email: here4you@nils-blum-oeste.net

Privacy Policy for MotoFlow

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 09:27:22 +0100

Introduction

MotoFlow is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data, or rather, the lack thereof, in our app.

Data Collection

MotoFlow does not collect any personal data from users. There are no advertisements, login requirements, email collection, or social media integrations within the app. We do not store any information on our own servers.

Data Storage

Any data generated by the app is stored solely on your Apple iCloud account, if you choose to use iCloud for backup purposes. This data is not accessed or processed by us in any way. Apple’s privacy policies apply to data stored on iCloud; you can review them at Apple Privacy Policy.

Troll Breeder

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 17:44:03 +0000

A few years ago and wouldn’t have thought to get to this point, but here we are: In less than two weeks I am going to release my first single to streaming platforms globally and a full album is in the pipeline too!

While I worked hard on becoming a metal guitar player and starting bands when I was younger, the adventure came to an end at some point at university. You know, learning, profession, academia and other stuff got in the way.

Clojure music event: Audible side effects

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 07:25:23 +0000

On March 1st, 2020 the “Audible Side Effects” will come to town!

This is an event I am organising as a satellite event to the :clojureD conference. We will use Clojure to work on any kind of music or sound project. This could be sound design and synthesis, algorithmic composition or whatever else comes to your mind.

If you would like to join and meet, please sign up at http://bit.ly/ase-2020!

EuroClojure 2017 talk: Intro to Probabilistic Programming and Clojure’s Anglican

Thu, 31 Aug 2017 14:03:26 +0000

At this year’s EuroClojure I gave a talk about probabilistic programming with Clojure, using the Anglican probabilistic programming system.

Abstract:

Probabilistic Programming Systems aim to merge general purpose programming with probabilistic modelling. They provide powerful statistical inference and thus allow developers to focus on the modelling with tools and environments they are comfortable with. These emerging methods are promising additions to the Data Scientist’s toolbox and an interesting, satisfying playground for programming enthusiasts. This talk is an introduction to Probabilistic Programming Systems, their use and value for the industry and Clojure’s great library “Anglican”.

Interview with PurelyFunctional.tv: Intro to Probabilistic Programming and Clojure’s Anglican

Wed, 12 Jul 2017 14:26:38 +0000

I was interviewed by PurelyFuntional.tv about my upcoming talk Intro to Probabilistic Programming and Clojure’s Anglican at EuroClojure 2017.

You can find the full interview here:

https://purelyfunctional.tv/speaker-interview/nils-blum-oeste-euroclojure-2017-interview/

Podcast recommendation: "The technological forces that are shaping our world"

Mon, 06 Mar 2017 08:04:47 +0000

The Art of Manliness podcast (I know, just try to ignore the name, I don’t like it either) has this great episode with Kevin Kelly (Wired, Whole Earth Catalogue) about the next big things in tech. Check it out:

The Art of Manliness: #267: The Technological Forces That Are Shaping Our World

JavaFX with Style: Using Clojure, fn-fx and garden for desktop application design

Sun, 26 Feb 2017 20:30:07 +0000

Here is a quick introduction to style your Clojure JavaFX application via CSS using the garden library.

Intro

I am still working on a desktop application built with Clojure and fn-fx and I am making good progress, pretty happy with it so far. When I gave a talk about it at the Clojure meetup Berlin, I was asked about how it looks. Well it might not be spectacular, but I was actually quite happy with the default look of it. Yeah, despite being a Java app! It might be hard to be believe when you still remember the stuff from the 90s and 00s, but check it out yourself:

Podcast Recommendation: Moving from the Cloud to the Edge

Sat, 18 Feb 2017 10:33:18 +0000

The cloud might not be a sustainable model for handling computation in massive IoT scenarios. Instead lots of the data processing might need to be done close to the devices. Resources, efficiency and latency are reasons where such a system “on the edge” might be beneficial or even a hard requirement.

A very interesting topic! A great introduction is this episode of the Software Engineering Daily podcast with Peter Levine: The End of Cloud Computing with Peter Levine. Peter also has a talk about the very topic.

Building declarative GUIs with Clojure, JavaFX and fn-fx (Clojure Berlin Meetup talk)

Sun, 12 Feb 2017 11:12:36 +0000

why not use Electron?

A few days ago I gave a talk at the Clojure Meetup Berlin about building GUIs with Clojure and JavaFX.

Here is the abstract:

Building declarative GUIs with Clojure, JavaFX and fn-fx (Dr. Nils Blum-Oeste)

JavaFX is the current standard GUI framework included in most Java distributions and the successor to Swing. It is readily available via interop to any Clojure developer. I would like to give an introduction to an alternative approach using halgari/fn-fx: A thin Clojure wrapper around JavaFX by Timothy Baldrige that allows building GUIs declaratively from a single application state atom instead of dealing with the mutable JavaFX objects directly.

:clojureD: Just a few more days of waiting

Wed, 08 Feb 2017 15:25:17 +0000

The :clojureD conference is approaching quickly: February 25, 2017 in Berlin, yes that is only about two weeks away!

I am really looking forward to it and hope to meet you there. We have a quite interesting mix of talks I would say. Among my favourites are

Functional GUI programming with Clojure and JavaFX: Meet halgari/fn-fx

Mon, 30 Jan 2017 17:55:50 +0000

As stated in a previous post I am in the process of building a GUI application and I would like to use Clojure for that. In this post I would like to write about my experiences building a small app for evaluation of the halgari/fn-fx Clojure library that aims at building GUIs with JavaFX in a declarative way, similar to what React does for the browser DOM.

Disclaimer: Why not Electron?

I also considered using Electron but I would prefer a solution that runs on the JVM so that I can make full use of that. However, if you can live with the JS runtime I would definitely recommend checking out Electron too. Probably I will have a follow-up post about Electron. :)

Desktop GUIs with Clojure in 2017: What are the options?

Fri, 20 Jan 2017 08:26:25 +0000

As I am in the process of developing an application for data analysis on chemical data the need for building a desktop GUI came up. Why desktop you ask? Excellent question! I think for this particular project, the combination of ease of use, data privacy and performance make it worth exploring an approach with a local, self-contained application instead of anything involving remote servers.

Actually in the end we might build a SaaS too or move to such a model completely.

Generative Art with Clojure via Quil and Processing

Sat, 03 Oct 2015 20:02:00 +0000

Recently I got some interest in generative “art”. Without going into what qualifies as art and what not, here are some of the things I created:

Generative Art with Processing

The code generating these images is available on github over here. Try them live, as a couple of these images are from actual animations.

Microservices, Music and More @ Futurice Beer&Tech

Sat, 05 Sep 2015 08:56:11 +0000

A few weeks ago Christoph and I gave an introduction to MicroServices at Futurice’s Beer&Tech sessions in Berlin. The idea was to collect our impressions from the DevOps conference 2015 in Berlin. I think we covered a lot of ground here from business value to technology and some simple live examples. The tools we introduced to were Docker, Consul and Prometheus and how to glue them together easily.

As part of giving this talk, I developed a small playground with the mentioned technologies. I already blogged briefly about this project called “MS-KOS”. The live coding examples can be found on Github: MS-KOS

Getting rid of Facebook on your Spotify account

Wed, 05 Aug 2015 15:54:25 +0000

When Spotify started, they only allowed to create accounts via your Facebook account. Well this sucked of course, and they moved away from that. However, having signed up at that time, I was stuck with having to use Facebook to get access to my Spotify account. Of course one could easily create a new account without Facebook these days and there are even ways to migrate your playlist and other data to that new account. The Spotify support knowledge base suggests, that you have to create a new account and to me it does not read like you could keep you playlists and other data.

letfn drilldown: A Clojure special form in detail

Fri, 31 Jul 2015 14:48:54 +0000

Motivation

A short discussion on the #clojure-berlin channel ( Clojurians on Slack) got me interested in the letfn special form of clojure.core. The question was raised if the docstring of letfn describes it well. Wether it is, or not, I got interested in how it works and more specifically why it’s syntax is different from let for example.

Here is the documentation for letfn:

(doc letfn)

-------------------------
clojure.core/letfn
  (letfn [fnspecs*] exprs*)
Special Form
  fnspec ==> (fname [params*] exprs) or (fname ([params*] exprs)+)

  Takes a vector of function specs and a body, and generates a set of
  bindings of functions to their names. All of the names are available
  in all of the definitions of the functions, as well as the body.

As you can see it takes a vector of function specs and every function spec has the form (fname [params\*] exprs). I was quite surprised to see such a syntax for the specs: Each spec is a list, but it’s not quoted. So outside of the letfn special form the spec would be evaluated.

WWW, Software, Politics, Freedom: Arte Documentary about the Web

Thu, 30 Jul 2015 07:40:43 +0000

I just watched a documentary on Arte about the World Wide Web from it’s origins to it’s modern importance and related aspects like freedom of speech, copyrights, digital surveillance, politics and the like. I recommend checking it out, especially if you have an interest in the Internet’s role for current and future societies or - on the other hand - don’t know much about that.

You can watch it right here, available in French and German:

ClojureBridge Berlin and Clojure learning groups

Fri, 24 Jul 2015 07:54:39 +0000

Recently I had the chance to be a coach at ClojureBridge Berlin. You might not have heard about this event before, but maybe you know RailsBridge. ClojureBridge’s mission is:

ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women.

Of course I did not hesitate to volunteer for that. I have to admit though, that I also had a hidden agenda: I wanted to test the hypothesis, that a LISP (Clojure in this case) is well suited to get started with programming. When talking to experienced developers about Clojure, I often have to face a negative reaction towards LISPs, sometimes also about (mostly) pure Functional Programming (less these days, as FP is so hip again). When I told some colleagues, including some with a formal computer science education as well as way more experienced devs that me, that I am going to help programming beginners to get started by using Clojure, they most often asked back if this is some kind of sadistic prank.

Mundane Clojure for Mortals: Building a simple Web API

Thu, 23 Jul 2015 17:01:16 +0000

A while ago I did a small introduction to building a simple REST API with Clojure from scratch at Futurice in Berlin. While preparing that, I did create a small tutorial and demo project to follow along ( GitHub, Tutorial). The presentation was recorded on video and you can check it out right now, right here:

[embed]https://vimeo.com/125578412[/embed]

Feedback, as well as pull requests are highly appreciated. The tutorial is not complete yet and has some glitches here and there I guess. However, I already got feedback, that I was a good starting point for multiple people without previous Clojure experience. Thanks Nils

MS-KOS: A Micro Services Playground using Docker, Consul and Prometheus

Fri, 17 Jul 2015 19:40:37 +0000

As a demo for a talk my colleague Christoph and I gave at Futurice, also visited by students from HPI, I put together a small playground for creating and managing Micro Services. It’s work in progress, but usable already and might be a good starting point if you would like to try out your own setup with Docker, Consul and Prometheus.

The actual nice thing is, that it’s basically just a collection of Docker CLI commands. Nice images are available already, I just threw in a super simple Clojure Service.

Podcasts for developers: A few recommendations

Sat, 04 Jul 2015 10:31:36 +0000

I like listening to podcast while running. During marathon preparation I run around 50-60km per week, so there is plenty of time to learn exciting stuff about latest technologies. Here are my favorite podcasts for software developers:

Software Engineering Radio

http://www.se-radio.net/

Software Engineering Radio is an awesome Podcast if you are a professional software developer and want to hear about tech in-depth. This is probably my favorite Podcast of them all: Excellent choice of topics, great guests and high quality production.

Firefox Developer Edition as Default Browser in Gnome

Mon, 22 Jun 2015 18:47:42 +0000

After visiting the Mozilla meetup, I decided to give the Firefox Developer Edition a spin.

Pretty smooth sailing so far. However, there was one minor glitch and it wasn’t immediately obvious to me, how to fix it:

I could not set the Developer Edition installation as my default browser in Gnome (with Gnome Shell on Fedora 22). I did a manual installation of the Firefox Developer Edition and could run and use it. But as Gnome wasn’t aware of it, I could not select it in the Gnome “Default Applications” settings, neither did it work from within the Firefox settings.

Web of Trust: Key Signing Party at Futurice

Sun, 14 Jun 2015 07:22:58 +0000

This weekend, Futurice met in Helsinki for our annual #futucamp.

What an excellent opportunity to improve the web of trust by having a Key Signing Party. Now it’s your turn: On your next company event or wherever you meet people, think about verifying identities and matching public keys.

If you meet me anywhere (e.g. meetups or conferences), I can sign your public key as long as you provide an ID with a photo, as well as your public key fingerprint.

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.

Sun, 24 May 2015 08:00:47 +0000

It is easy to lie with statistics. It is hard to tell the truth without it.

― Andrejs Dunkels

*Leila: All sharing shop - Collaborative commons in practice

Mon, 18 May 2015 18:13:07 +0000

Today I visited and became a member at *Leila. You can think of it as a “lending library for things”. You can get a wide selection of tools, games, cooking equipment, electronic devices and much more.

It works like this: You become a member by providing at least one of your items to the *Leila stock. Other members can lend your item from now on, without any costs. Per given item you can also get only one item, giving two items and you can lend two items at the same time. As simple as that!

Gain freedom (almost): Impressions from Firefox OS

Sat, 16 May 2015 10:07:43 +0000

I am in the process of migrating services from properitary, closed solutions over to open and libre products. OwnCloud, SubSonic and iRedMail replaced Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Mail and Calendar, as well as Spotify (way smaller library admittedly).

A remaining bummer was my reliance on Android with a significant amount of Google services. So I was happy to give Mozilla’s Firefox OS a chance. Here are my experiences so far.

Firefox OS

The latest Firefox OS available for my hardware was v2.0. So not the latest iteration (v2.2) but at least the most recent major release. Your mileage with Firefox OS v1.x may vary a lot.

Clojurescript's Reagent: Using props in lifecycle hooks

Sun, 08 Mar 2015 06:37:39 +0000

I was struggling to get use Facebook React’s props in Reagent’s lifecycle hooks. Don’t worry if you are in the same boat, here comes the solution. My current way of doing this is to use reagent.core/props in the lifecycle hooks.

Here is a small working example (based on my work on an application for polytopic vector analysis (PVA): PVA-Parrot), illustrating how to plot with Reagent and the Flot charting library. Pay attention to the usage of `props` in the first `let` block.

Big Data is NOT a competitive advantage

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 14:21:26 +0000

Do you think your company should leverage Big Data? Are you looking for Hadoop and Apache Storm engineers already? Did you evaluate cloud service to run distributed computations and your DevOps team enjoys some good trainings about how to manage those?

That’s awesome!

Well, as long as you actually need all that stuff: Yes, there is a lot of buzz around Big Data. And yes, I am convinced there is a tremendous amount of value in it. Big Data based companies are real and they can have disruptive products.

Bragging Rights: Marathoner

Sun, 22 Feb 2015 12:28:55 +0000

So far I blogged here only about failing at my first marathon. The lessons learned paid off in the end. Meanwhile I ran two official marathons: My debut in Dresden 2013 (03:55:16) and in 2014 I ran the Berlin marathon (03:55:13). Success is worth mentioning too, right? ;)

Berlin Marathon

Berlin Marathon Finish

Berlin Marathon Medals

Both I was able to finish in under 4h. For me that’s a great result especially for the debut in Dresden. Great achievements? Well for sure, but no reason to settle. Actually a good foundation to build upon: Now I am aiming at running my first ultra marathon! In 2015 I would like to run 50km at once. Does not necessarily have to be an official race, something in the country side would be great, as a contrast to the city runs.

Sorting out projects - Starting new ones

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 13:06:12 +0000

Who doesn’t know about having too many projects at hand? Guess I am not different, probably rather on the more excessive side of things here.

Having finished my PhD and getting some personal issues sorted out, I feel having capacity and the drive to get my hands dirty again. Among the things I already started are some Clojure open source contributions, game experiments and a few other things. However, I felt this is a good opportunity to put a collection of projects on my website.

Projects and Portfolio

Sat, 21 Feb 2015 12:38:35 +0000

A collection of past and present projects. This list is not meant to be complete, nor always up to date. Also some of the things listed here might be in a very immature and incomplete state, be aware of dragons - and Chilicorns!

Open Source Contributions

The goto place for my open source contribution is on Github of course, but let me point out a few highlights here:

PVA-Parrot: Application using Polytopic Vector Analysis (PVA) to decipher mixing components in compositional, chemical data
Incanter(Contributor): R-like data analysis with Clojure
Mundane Clojure for Mortals: A tutorial to build a REST API with Clojure for beginners
MS-KOS: Example implementation and playground for running Micro Services with Docker, Consul, Registrator and Prometheus
PET: Petrological Elementary Tools for Mathematica, Collaboration with Prof. E. Dachs: Dachs (2004); Computers & Geosciences 30: 173-182
Web Plotter: A plotting library to plot from Clojure(Script) to HTML5
Slimto: HTML5 mobile-first application exploring ideas around how to facilitate achieving weight loss goals via social collaboration
Volcano Report: An open source Android app, reporting weekly volcano activities based on data from the Smithsonian Institute and the USGS

Thanks to the awesome colleagues at Futurice, I am a proud owner of the Futurice Chilicorn Open Source Contribution Mug:

Color Duel: A pet project game built with Construct 2

Mon, 22 Dec 2014 08:01:31 +0000

Being an early adaptor for Construct 2, it was about time to get a game built with it out of the door. I think I bought this in 2011 for 30€ or something like that. With an increasing interest in educational apps and new teaching and learning approaches I finally dug into Construct 2, building a complete, yet simple game.

Without further ado: Color Duel can be found an Google Play

Screen2

Screen4

Screen8

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:56:06 +0000

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

― Albert Einstein

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:48:56 +0000

Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we’re in — the one that we think is reality.

― Alan Kay

I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:45:05 +0000

I invented the term Object-Oriented, and I can tell you I did not have C++ in mind.

― Alan Kay, 2005

The central enemy of reliability is complexity.

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:36:26 +0000

The central enemy of reliability is complexity.

― Geer et al., 2003

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

Fri, 23 May 2014 15:26:47 +0000

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

Impressum

Fri, 23 May 2014 11:04:12 +0000

Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG: Nils Blum-Oeste In der Gasse 9 34286 Spangenberg

Kontakt:

Telefon: +4915115228262

E-Mail: nils@blum-oeste.de

Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 55 Abs. 2 RStV:

Nils Blum-Oeste In der Gasse 9 34286 Spangenberg

Quelle: Impressumgenerator von e-recht24.de

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3 lessons learned from failing at marathon debut

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 07:56:14 +0000

Last year I failed miserably on running my first marathon. Severe pain from shin splints forced me to stop running completely while training for Berlin marathon 2012. I really tried to continue running but that was probably the worst thing to do. Finally I realized I had to take a break. I stopped running completely for about three months.

Having to do so was disappointing of course. But it also was an important lesson, an opportunity to learn. I thought about why my body shut down. What did I do wrong? Here are three things I learned:

Karma very slow on Chrome? Don't run it in background tab!

Thu, 25 Jul 2013 17:24:04 +0000

Very recently I started to use the very nice Karma Test Runner. I really do recommend to check it out.

However I wondered why tests ran very slow sometimes (>20s) and sometimes they where very fast (<1s). Quickly I realised the issue was having the Chrome tab in the background:

The Chrome tab which was connected to Karma was one among others. I used the other tabs for web browsing and development, so the Karma tab wasn’t the active tab. This gives it a very low priority and running tests became extremely sluggish.

Image analysis with Clojure and OpenCV: A face detection example

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 08:43:41 +0000

I recently got not only interested in Clojure but also want to utilize it for some image analysis now. OpenCV is a very solid package for image and video analysis. Java bindings have been released for OpenCV at the beginning of 2013. Unfortunately it wasn’t as easy as I expected in the first place to use it from Clojure.

I would like to show you how to do it. Here is an outline of the necessary steps:

Tame the command line: How to get started with tmux

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 09:55:07 +0000

If you are using lots of command line tools (being a cool guy, you should!), you most probably have a need to organize all this stuff. If you are a web developer for example, you want to edit files, have a look on your webserver logs, monitor automated tests, handle your git repo and so on. There is a lot of stuff going on there!

All these tools want to be tamed, to achieve your most productive work flow. Handling lots of separate terminal windows often is not the most efficient thing. That’s where tmux comes into play.

First marathon at risk: One month to go

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:18:22 +0000

In my last post I told myself “not to overdo” it. Sadly exactly this happened. I have lots of trouble with shin splints (medial). :(

What happened?

The last long run, which went well was on 19th August. Previously I was running over 30km multiple times on the weekend. Obviously this was too much. I ended up with painful shin splints in both legs. Normally these are a result of overstress.

Second month of training for first marathon

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:15:02 +0000

About two month ago I did sign up for my first marathon and started to focus my training for that event. In my previous post I defined a simple way to measure my progress towards the goal, running the marathon distance.

Another month has passed and here is my updated report. It was not a great month for training, as we did move to Berlin and a had a bad cold for almost 2 weeks. Both things did collide with my training schedule. But let’s have a closer look at the state of affairs:

First marathon: Resume after first month of training

Sat, 14 Jul 2012 10:12:52 +0000

Roughly one month ago I did sign up for my first marathon. At that time I also wrote a post about how I will prepare for that. So let’s have fun and create some additional pressure by publishing the results so far.

How to measure progress

The main goal is to be able to run the marathon distance. That’s why maximum run distance is of major importance. Secondly I want to finish in under 4 hours. This means a pace of under 5.7 min/km (btw. I really dislike using this unit, but it’s just so common for running). So I am having an eye on the average pace of the longest run.

AngularJS: Send auth token with every request

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 09:27:03 +0000

AngularJS is an awesome javascript framework. With it’s $resource service it is super fast and easy to connect your javascript client to a RESTful API. It comes with some good defaults to create a CRUD interface.

However if you are using an API, which needs authentication via an auth token, you might run into issues: The resource factory creates a singleton. If you do not already have an auth token when the factory is called, or if the auth token changes afterwards, you cannot put the auth token as a default request parameter in the factory.

CORS API with OAuth2 authentication using Rails and AngularJS

Sat, 23 Jun 2012 09:41:54 +0000

Introduction

For my latest project PomodoroEasy I wanted as much decoupling of the web client and the server as possible. So the server only provides a RESTful JSON API to feed the client. All the templating, views and business logic are done clientside.

Furthermore I wanted them to be provided on different servers and domains. The client is a single page webapp, which resides as a static project on it’s own server. It is not sent from the Rails API server.

PomodoroEasy: Prelaunch access to the upcoming Pomodoro app

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 13:48:58 +0000

If you stumbled across my article series about how to build a webapp, you already know: I am working on an app to bring the awesome Pomodoro Technique to life on your machines.

The Pomodoro Technique is a great, hassle free way to boost you productivity. The main goal is to focus on your tasks and to prevent interruptions. There is no app out there, which has everything you need to use the technique. So if you are interested in the Pomorodo Technique, checkout PomodoroEasy and sign up for pre-launch access. I am happy to get your feedback for this!

Project 42195: Training for the first marathon

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 10:06:22 +0000

Running a marathon has been on my list for quite a while now. The past 1.5 years I did focus on learning Sambo (russian martial arts). But I just did sign up for the Frankfurt Marathon in October.

What are the goals?

The primary goal is to finish. In general this probably should be the only goal for a first marathon. However since I did very well in over fulfilling my self set goals recently, I will aim at a finish time below 4h.

Rule the bash: How to edit CLI input with VIM

Thu, 31 May 2012 10:23:32 +0000

Sometimes we have to write quite long shell commands, right? And from time to time you have an error in there or want to change a command from the history to do something else, right?

If you are a vim user you probably hate to navigate with the cursor keys to the position in the command you would like to change. So why not use vim (commands) for that? Here are two ways to do it:

HowTo build a webapp: Document the domain model

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:44:59 +0000

In the previous article we did define a vision and the key features for a MVP of our app. Now we will discover the domain of our app and get a model of it. Such a domain model is a conceptual model of the entities and their relationships relevant for you app.

Why you should do it

The reason to produce this is to clarify your understanding of the problem you are trying to solve with your app. It is just a structured way to think about your software. By doing so you often will change your view on the problem: You will discover things you did not consider beforehand. In other cases you may be able to simplify your initial ideas.

HowTo build a WebApp: Define what the app will do

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:40:52 +0000

This is the second part of this Tutorial series. The first article can be found here: How to build a WebApp: Strategic Planning

If you are familiar with agile methodologies you may want to avoid a lot of documentation. In general I think this is a good approach. But it does not mean, that you should never ever create any documentation. This first step aims at structuring your ideas and make you think about the product.

HowTo build a WebApp: Strategic Planning

Tue, 22 May 2012 13:37:33 +0000

Intro

Hi and welcome to the first article in this series. I will cover the whole process of building a modern Webapp. We will start with an initial planning (covered in this article) and finish with the public deployment of the app.

I will rather focus on the development process than on implementation. There are a lot of great tutorials out there to learn how to code and implement stuff. This series has two goals: