Blog

Interreflections a movie review and my thoughts on Peter Joseph

To review Interreflections we need to understand Peter Joseph. He is a filmmaker but also the creator of the zeitgeist movement. For better or worse, Peter has played a major influence on the way I look at society. In hindsight, Peter clearly followed the spirit of the times from being an early adopter of the most popular conspiracy theories to being an early critic of the current capitalistic economic system. I hope this article provides Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

Exploring reactivity in Svelte JS with real-world examples

So, we all saw the presentation by Rich Harris, the creator of the Svelte Javascript compiler, and are excited about implementing spreadsheet reactivity in our projects. However, even though the concept is easy to grasp when looking at simple examples implementing reactivity is sometimes not obvious when working with real data. In the last months, I have worked hard on Wisvids an online math video subscription service build with Svelte JS and this article explores Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

How to use external Javascript libraries (e.g. Stripe.js) in SvelteJS

There are many javascript libraries that give a lot of functionality out of the box which we normally include with a <script src=”url”></script> in the header section of the HTML page. In this article, we explain a method to do use these libraries in SvelteJS components. In doing so we explore three features of Svelte that are not often written about: onMount, svelte-head, and global(). So as an example we build an integration with the Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

A good authentication example, Sapper sessions, Svelte Store

For my new architecture with microservices and Svelte, a vital implementation detail is the authentication and authorization mechanisms. In the last article, there was an example of how to build the signup component and in this example, we take a look at sessions. The final result is basic account creation and authentication support with a JWT token for upstream services. A quick glance at the authentication API We use an external service created in API Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

How to implement custom pathfinding A* & CC in Unreal Engine 4

In this article, we see how our team implemented pathfinding in the Unreal Engine 4 for the upcoming tower defense game MassMonsterMaze. Besides using the default navigation meshes of the Unreal engine we implemented an A* algorithm in blueprints and a connected components (island detection) algorithm in C++. The hope is that the article gives a headstart to other game developers trying to implement pathfinding in their projects. The use case In our game, the Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

A tutorial on how to use the Messenger component of Symfony 4 with RabbitMQ

Running tasks asynchronous is becoming vital for any large web application. An example, on which I worked, is a Facebook-like activity stream for Open Social (Drupal 8). Imagine that a personal notification based on a relation, rank, and gender has to be generated for millions of users when an event happens. Pretty complex right? Now, imagine the messages to have to be aggregated (e.g., messages like there are 5 new comments on your posts). It Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

A realistic plan to pay for a universal basic income in the Netherlands

Een Nederlandse versie kan je hier vinden The idea of a universal basic income (UBI) is gaining traction on the whole political sphere. The central concept is that every citizen gets a monthly allowance that is above the poverty line with no mandatory requirements (e.g., having to apply for a job). Even if you do have a salary, you would still get the monthly UBI on top of it. As the concept is assuming a Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago
API Platform and Symfony 4

How to build a Symfony 4 API Platform application from scratch

Symfony 4 and the API Platform Framework make it easy to create an API application with basic CRUD operations. However, in real-world applications more advanced features (e.g. authentication and custom endpoints) are needed which require quite a bit of knowledge to set-up. Therefore, in this blog article, we explore these advanced features by creating an example application that covers the following topics: Step 1. Installation of API Platform and the EasyAdminBundle Step 2. Creation of Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

Uploading files using Node.js as an API Gateway to an external API using Svelte/Sapper

Following the documentation of API Platform, we start with an API that accepts the multipart/form-data format. We use Sapper (Node.js+Express) as an API gateway. First, we need to send a local file from Svelte to the Sapper server. Sapper then receives the file and calls external API. Sending the file with Svelte FormData automatically adds the correct format to the Sapper server. /gateway/media_objects is the Sapper route Processing the file on NodeJs This part is Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

Thesis emotion detection Chapter 1. Introduction

This research investigates the use of sentiment analysis technologies to extract affective states of users from text. A dataset of text annotated on affect by human raters was needed to test the affect detection algorithms. No such dataset was available, therefore data from the e-community Greenwire was annotated on affect which gave us insights into the agreement between human raters for affect annotation. Affect detection algorithms were made by automatically labeling Twitter data using emoticons. Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

Publishing my thesis work – Emotion detection using sentiment analysis

For my master thesis in “human media interaction” at the University of Twente, I worked on applying sentiment analysis technologies to emotion detection in online communities. I am proud of this work which took 10 months of programming and writing and I felt it deserved to be digitalized from PDF to HTML. After graduating I also gave a lecture to other HMI students and there was some interest in studying to topic further. I am Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago

How to get Davinci Resolve 16 to work in Linux Ubuntu 18.04

Davinci Resolve has official support for Linux since version 15. However, when trying to install it I ran into a few issues. I have an AMD video card so I can not give instructions for the NVIDIA drivers but the concepts are the same. I hope this article helps in fixing your issues to get Resolve running smoothly. Note, that there is always a risk when installing drivers. When you continue it is at your Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago
Andrew Yang speaking in front of flag

Why can Andrew Yang win the 2020 presidency?

Even though I do come from the Netherlands I am an enthusiastic follower of the presidential elections. Furthermore, when a tech-minded startup guy runs on the platform based on a universal basic income (Freedom dividend) policy it is difficult to not to watch every interview, debate, and rally he conducts. I first became aware of Andrew Yang from an interview with Sam Harris (unfortunately you can only hear half of the interview for free) and Read more…

By nielsvandermolen, ago