Since almost a year I work as a software engineer and architect consultant for the IMG Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen. IMG’s mission is to deal with mining damage independently, fairly, generously and expeditiously. Mining damage in the Groningen and Drenthe region is due to the extraction of gas by the companies Shell and Exxon Mobil. Currently, about 1100 damage claims are registered every week, and about 600 are resolved weekly. Additionally, IMG just released the “decrease in value” system, which gives home owners the possibility to request the money back that their house lost in value.

After being back from a little summerbreak, I stumpled upon the awesome AI Podcast from Lex Fridman. It is not only about AI, but computing in general, and also has a philosopical touch. For instance, the episode with Joscha Bach is highly recommended as Joscha is a very interesting and smart guy. It is hard to watch the whole episode at once due to all the input one has to process.

My favorite browser is Firefox. Only for about one year I was using Chrome, as Firefox performance was not as good back in the days. Luckily, the Firefox community is quite large and active. Hence, new addons are added each day, and heavily used once maintained well. Here I want to recommend some of the addons I use: Block Site Block Site blocks websites of your choice. It is also possible to set a schedule, e.

This week, the German government together with SAP and the Telekom presented the COVID-19 tracing app. To be honest, I am suprised how the whole process went. The documentation and source-code is fully available online. SAP and the Telekom processed valuable feedback from experts. Only the costs of nearly 20 milion Euro stand out. But if such an app needs to developed asap, logically, companies will charge higher fees as usual.

Last week I finally graduated with my Master. After some months of lots of sweat and writing, I gave the defense of my thesis last week Wednesday morning. I expected a grade between 7 and 8 (in the Netherlands the rating is between 1 and 10, and 10 is the max., the passing grade is 5.5). However, I even got a 9, which I really did not expect. Subsequently, my supervisor asked me if want to help them to make a scientific paper of my thesis to be published at a conference.