4 November 2025

25 links · Tuesday

You can't cURL a Border

Country borders don't return JSON, they return judgment. So I built a state machine for travel when governments won't expose your state.

In defence of digital ID

In the late 1930s, a Dutch civil servant, Jacobus Lentz, designed a near-unforgeable identity card. In 1940, the Dutch government rejected his proposal as too intrusive. Weeks later, Germany occupi…

The Meaning Of Life According to ChatGPT

"All right," said the computer, and settled into silence again. The two men fidgeted. The tension was unbearable. "You're really not going to like it," observed Deep Thought. "Tell us!" "All right," said Deep Thought. "The Answer to the Great Question..." "Yes…

Do I want Coders to Code?

I got involved with another no-code project at work. I actually chose the stack this time. And I only chose that stack because I have a project management role. The no-code solution is an off-brand internal distribution of Node-RED. Which at least is open sour…

Digital Twins – the missing pieces

Digital Twins are great, but they have some real pain points : cost of scanning cost of modelling massive data I believe Machine Learning will be used to solve those practical issues. New ML algori…

Qikcik Blog

First I wanted to say Hi, as it is my first post in my blog! After countless hours spent with my friend Qiu. I decided that this is finally the time to start writing my own blog. Of course, I could use WordPress or any other "blog engine", but then... where wo…

Debugging Microsoft's Job Portal

Or: When applying for a job becomes a technical interview you didn't sign up for TL;DR: Microsoft's job portal had a bug that prevented me...

Dynamically include files in Gitlab-CI

Recently in a Gitlab-CI pipeline I needed to dynamically include several variables that lived inside a yaml-file. The file that needed to be included was defined as a CICD-variable coming from an external API-call that triggered the CI-pipeline. The file were …