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soaringmonchi

32 karma · joined January 28, 2015

Founder of Kickstage. Power systems and data center enthusiast.
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soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
This is an assumption of course, but I think a combination of ease of access (no install, you can just play around, share your results, ask for advice) and seeing the visual flow of energy through the grid. You see how power being generated on one bus is consumed at another. Add a line in between, you see losses. Add a long line, you see the effects of capacitance on voltage and reactive power requirements.

One of my favourite features is the visualization of the admittance matrix and being able to interactively explore how the buses interact with each other.

soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
Thanks for the feedback! We're mainly working with transmission systems, so that's where the MW scale comes from. I'll check whether we can add a scale selector, that's a great idea.
soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
We're always looking for people to bridge the gap between electrical engineering and software development. EU only due to the nature of the industry and our clients unfortunately. Just send a CV to career@kickstage.com
soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
Very interesting project. We are still contemplating if / how we can integrate an interactive python shell in Bamboo. The challenges seem to be syncing the visual layer to the data structures in the shell and sand boxing properly as we don't want to lose the ability to offer this as a hosted version just for the ease of access.
soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
Thank you! We've tried it with engineers from other fields and it helped them understand the basic concepts needed to build software for e.g. grid operators.

Especially the visual admittance matrix has been useful (we'll publish a blog post how power flow and the admittance matrix works soon) as an introduction to the relevant algorithms.

soaringmonchi··on Show HN: BambooGrid – Open-source web UI for power grid modeling and power flow
Thanks for the kind words! Yes it's really meant as an educational tool that helps refreshing or teaching some context!

When you try to run power flow, make sure to either mark a generator as a slack or add an external grid element.

We published a basic tutorial here: https://kickstage.com/blog/modeling-and-simulating-power-gri...

Or you check out this super simple example: https://bamboo.kickstage.com/?s=ccnlYeEB

soaringmonchi··on Why Most Unit Testing is Waste (2014) [pdf]
I couldn't agree more. I am doing a lot of nodejs development these days and it's usually a pain to verify that the code works the way it should. Writing a quick bunch of unit tests is very superior to loading your code in an interactive console and manually fiddling with inputs / outputs. These unit tests often break at the first refactoring and we rewrite them at that point. I'm a bit surprised that people argue that unit tests facilitate "aggressive" refactorings. Aggressive refactoring to me means architecture changes and unit tests almost never survive those. Integration testing is what ensures proper functioning in those situations for me.
soaringmonchi··on Docker for Mac Beta Review
Have already sent an email, but no reply, yet. I am super excited about this and would love to test it out. Docker ID: threerabbits
soaringmonchi··on Teeth Whitening and the Hygiene Hypothesis
Sorry, but this sounds a bit short-sighted. While nobody should be sentenced to suffer severe pain for the rest of his life, just because your body isn't as capable as it used to be doesn't necessarily mean that you want to end your life. Often there will be people that you will leave behind and you certainly don't want to explain them that it's your decision to do just that.

On top of that, this is also dangerous from a social perspective where people could get a feeling that they are supposed to go once there is nothing they can contribute to society anymore.

We should rather focus on allowing making "regular" dying more dignified rather than promoting euthanasia.

soaringmonchi··on Understanding the Node.js Event Loop
The only thing that annoys me with this (and many other popular posts in our field recently) is that the author talks about "magic". I believe this started with the advent of Rails where some things seemed "magical" at first due to Ruby's meta-programming features. Many writers and speakers have adopted it since.

However, there is nothing occult about software development and we shouldn't use "magic" as an excuse for not understanding or describing things thoroughly. Just imagine your doctor explaining you a surgery in these terms.

Otherwise, a very good and refreshing read.

soaringmonchi··on Node.js Flow – Callback Hell vs. Async vs. Highland Streams
Definitely my preferred approach. Note that you need to run 6to5 with the -e flag to try this.