Blog

The OceanGate tragedy and why physics doesn't care about feelings

ChrisYoon May 3, 2026

When I recently went down the OceanGate rabbithole I realized that several factors contributing to the tragedy are related to the lack of sound engineering principles, which I previously mentioned in one of my blog posts and which help me build high-quality software. The OceanGate tragedy is a fresh reminder of why sound engineering principles are essential, especially when it comes to structures whose failure can cause death and destruction.

Developing and simulating robot stability

ChrisYoon May 13, 2025

Just recently I learned a new software tool that allows me to program and simulate a robot, using Python, ROS2 and Gazebo. This setup can be used not only to code the software for a real world robot, but also to simulate the behavior of the robot, its physics and environment.

Resilience engineering and what it means for the future of manufacturing systems

ChrisYoon May 10, 2025

Over the past few decades the lean production paradigm, along with the closely related just-in-time production, has dominated modern supply chain management and manufacturing systems. However, the Covid-19 pandemic revealed a fundamental weakness of modern supply chains and production systems: a persistent trade-off between efficiency and resilience.

The fundamental flaws of AI

ChrisYoon March 25, 2025

The invention of large language models (LLMs) has profoundly shaped the landscape of AI, sparking another wave of hype in the media and the industry with voices even speculating about the emergence of general artifical intelligence. What often goes overlooked in these optimistic accounts, however, is the fact that the challenges of AI to engineer general artificial intelligence are more fundamental than commonly assumed.

How engineering principles help me build high-quality software

ChrisYoon January 21, 2025

In recent years software engineers have become sloppy, especially when compared to the rigor and precision of traditional engineering disciplines. And, I think, at least part of the reason is that software engineering has increasingly decoupled from physical constraints. In recent years I came to the conclusion that I could borrow principles from traditional engineering and apply them to software engineering in order to improve the quality of my software products.

The year is heading towards its end: lessons learned and what's next

ChrisYoon December 31, 2024

The end of the year is the perfect time to reflect on past challenges and errors, draw valuable lessons and set clear goals for the future.

What I learned today is to carefully read messages in the Linux terminal

ChrisYoon December 21, 2024

Just recently I tested a couple of email clients on my Ubuntu machine, one of which was Evolution - the Gnome email client. Since Evolution doesn't allow me to implement CSS/HTML code into the email, I decided to uninstall the client and its related files. When I later rebooted my system, however, I almost got a heart attack.

Bitcoin and the fundamental problems of blockchain technology

ChrisYoon April 4, 2024

Engineers are often faced with the problem of trade-offs, which describes a situation, in which a certain advantage comes with a cost. In the blockchain space engineers have to deal with a fundamental trade-off between efficiency and resilience: either the blockchain is efficient and fast, which comes at the expense of its resilience or a blockchain is characterized by a high resilience, which makes it ineffcient and slow.

Encryption and decryption in Python Kivy for Android

ChrisYoon November 13, 2023

Just recently I developed an Android app using Python and Kivy, which required some tight security measures because it involved sensitive patient data. Moreover, the app allowed users to make requests to a server, for which a token was needed. Since I couldn't find any tutorial explaining encryption and decription for the Android OS based on Python Kivy, I decided to write a short tutorial on how to implement encryption and decryption on an Android device using Python Kivy.

The crisis of science and academia

ChrisYoon May 22, 2023

Universities are considered as the most trusted institutions in Western societies – a possible reason why some readers might view this post as exaggerating, if not conspiratorial. But the sad reality is that trust in science and academic institutions is increasingly compromised. In fact, there are three main reasons why science and diplomas are not a religion and why we should embrace scepticism towards science and academia: (1) technical and scientific errors, (2) corruption and (3) a complicated relationship between science and journalism.

Diving into the statistics of PCR test technology

ChrisYoon October 26, 2022

One of the claims stated by supporters of the Covid regime is that Covid cases are underreported and that the official statistics do not reflect reality. I agree with the latter part of the claim, but in this article I will show why the claim that Covid numbers are underreported is not true and why, in fact, the official statistics overstate the actual prevalence of C-19 to a considerable extent.

The problem of data biases

ChrisYoon June 14, 2022

It is a common practice at universities for math and statistics professors to demonstrate models by using perfect, and in many cases even fictional data. When students later apply these models in real-world scenarios, however, they often encounter the stark reality that perfect data does not exist. Most datasets are characterized by underlying biases, many of which remain unidentified. And even when biases are recognized, there are no formulas to account for these errors.

Using Selenium to crawl data from JavaScript pages

ChrisYoon March 10, 2022

A common problem with Javascript pages is that their html code might not contain the data that we want to crawl. Instead, the html of Javascript pages includes pieces of JS code that dynamically load data from the database in the backend into the page, but not the actual data. To deal with this problem we can use the selenium library which comes with a variety of useful functions, one of which allows us to extract data loaded from the backend.

Shell scripting for daily tasks

ChrisYoon January 19, 2022

Shell scripting empowers IT specialists and software engineers to execute a range of automated tasks via the command line or terminal, such as code compilation or batch processing of computers. However, the appeal of shell scripting extends beyond server operators and programmers. In fact, numerous everyday tasks can be automated through shell scripting, reducing life's complexities.

Developing a neural network based on Python and Keras for automated industry classification

ChrisYoon November 3, 2021

In this post I will show how to develop a neural network by using Python and Keras. The neural network was part of an old project, in which the system extracts the statistically most relevant keywords from a website and classifies them into the respective industry category. In this post the model will be trained by a dataset with 16,000 firms and their top website keywords as input variables and more than 30 different industry categories as the output variable.

The art of cyber war: tools and techniques

ChrisYoon January 18, 2020

The complexity of what military pundits call cyber space consists of a mixture of a large number of technologies and tools at different levels as well as their dynamic interaction and progress. In the following blog post, I will present common offensive and defensive tools and techniques used in cyber warfare and provide a basic overview of their general principles.