pbberlin.github.io

Projects 2022

Custom HTML form input

Consisting of

• Range input
• Text input as “display panel”, disabled
• Radio input for “no answer” state
• Hidden input to for having an initial state (for no value entered yet);
  because range inputs are forced by the HTML spec to assume some value,
  even without any user input
• Variable scale with freely definable ticks and tick-labels
  (lots of server generated divs and widths, avoiding blurry CSS gradients)
• Browser-specific CSS finessing for styling the range input and aligning everything
• Further CSS finessing to show and hide the thumb on init and “no answer”
• Javascript to mediate between the four input elements
• Server side branches to render initial state or “no answer” state
• Server side code, sadly duplicating the content creation for the “display panel”;
  but saving another Javascript actrocity for the init state

Everything is still valid HTML/CSS/Javascript, but the necessary amount of programming is disheartening

• 450 lines of serverside code, including HTML templates
• 150 lines of Javascript; highly intertwined with the server side
• 300 lines of CSS; I still refuse to use another tool
  just for “generating” CSS;
  thank god, CSS variables provide some flexibility

Taken together, its 10 days and ~1000 lines of very idiosynchratic, finicky, HTML-DOM specific programming. Is there a way, to reliably unit-test such a mongrel creation?

The result improves user productivity a lot; and it even looks good. But I still feel, I contributed to the Tower of Babel.

Private debt survey

An entity commissioned a survey of private lending from us.

This brings the number of surveys realized using go-questionnaire to ten.

1. ZEW Index
2. EU policy areas
3. Fiscal macro multiplicators
4. Financial literacy
5. State government tax policy
6. EU reform
7. Paternalism of politicians
8. Retirement saving
9. Green finance
10. Private lending

Many thousand survey questions were answered by members of parliament from France, Italy, Germany, the EU; from mayors and state parliamentarians in Italy and Germany; and from academic researchers from all EU member states.

No data has been lost, no data got corrupted and the software never crashed.

I could not have done this without the amazing productivity of the Go language. The ideas behind it are outlined by Rob Pike here.

Mass mailing

• After seven years of manually operating various mass mailers,
  I coded something fully automatable

• Result: go-massmail

  • Reading recipients from CSV files
  • Filling content with dynamic values
  • Composing and sending emails using go-mail

BIII chooses go-questionnaire         (3.May)

• The BIII and Uni Hamburg choose my software
  to conduct an online survey about impact investing

Macro trends in savings         (27. April)

• Powerpoint

PWA technology prototype         (16. Feb)

• Cheap web app with decentralized data storage

• Potential for research projects

• Powerpoint

Latest trends in email server configuration         (9. Feb)

• Sender domain certification and SMTPS with our new zimbra email server

• Based on Let’s Encrypt certification

• Powerpoint

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