LidaRx / easy LIDAR data processing for .NET

LIDAR scanners are awesome devices and I’ve been fascinated by the broad application possibilities for a long time. When I finally got my hands on two devices this year I was quickly disappointed with how little software was available, even for the simplest things. Narrowing down the search to C#/.NET SDKs lead to: zero, zilch, zip, nada šŸ™

A few hours, lots of coffee and a few datasheets later; voilĆ  LidaRx was born!

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No Bullshit Metrics

Reports

Iā€™ve been asked to build fancy metrics gathering tools and even fancier reports over and over the past years. While metrics can be a great help, there are numerous things to take into consideration to minimize side effects! These considerations are even more important when youā€™re dealing with qualitative dimensions, especially in creative processes such as in the field of engineering.

In enterprise realms, pointy haired bosses often try to ā€œsolveā€ problems by measuring stuff. Got too many support tickets? Then make a great looking trend chart about them! Once you have the numbers, apply some random improvement goal (ā€œcut those by 20% next monthā€) and there you go! Somebody just created an easy to cheat game: instead of analyzing the really issue (shipping untested product, incomplete user manualā€¦), support engineers will probably just reject a few more tickets or use untracked channels for resolution. And thereā€™s nobody to blame for it. Itā€™s pretty much human nature that we like to be good at our work. Thus, many become very clever in ā€œlooking great at whatever game corporate just inventedā€.

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Allons-y!

Hi there! I finally found some time to build a real web site for Staudt Engineering. The previous draft lasted for more than a year and served its purpose as a place-holder, but it never was what I wanted.

This is the second attempt, the first having been giving Ghost a shot. And while I really love the technical aspects of it (Markdown as markup language and it’s well put together overall), I found that it had some rough edges and a surprisingly high cost for the “Pro” (hosted) version. I gave up after a few hours and got back to WordPress which served me well for years (I’ve been running blogs and websites with it since early 2005). Sticking with tool… y’know…

Anyhow. About a day and a half later I’m rather satisfied with the result. The default “TwentySeventeen” template has some neat customization inbuilt, add two or three plug-ins and you can shape it to your will!

So, what’s the deal?

Besides using this site as presentation for business purposes, I want to write some bits about both tech and non-tech topics.

For the next few months the plan is to write a series of posts about my human-centered systems design principles, interleaved with hands-on technical stuff about Docker, ASP.NET Core and C#.

See you soon!