The developer about himself:

Uncompromising automation of billiards game operations, from tournament planning and data collection to the transmission of game results. That is the goal of the Carambus project.

Actually, my consulting business Ullrich-IT-Consulting is already history, as I have been retired for quite some time. But on the occasion of th anniversary of my club Billardclub Wedel 61 e.V., I finally came up with the idea of contributing something substantial.

And anyone who knows me knows that throughout my professional life – most recently as a member of the visionary circle at Sun Microsystems – I have always been keen to use the latest technologies.

And first came into contact with the Ruby/Rails development environment in 2008. Since then, I have appreciated the enormous progress made in development speed. The big question now was whether this project, which in many places places real-time demands on the display and recording systems involved, could be meaningfully realized with RoR.

The project was therefore preceded by an approximately four-week evaluation of possible development environments – in particular React, React Native, and Angular. Unfortunately, this led to very complex breakpoints between server-side database-oriented logic and JavaScript-based end devices. In other words, different operating systems, languages, and frameworks. Not a good idea. Fortunately, I came across an ideal solution via GoRails – Stimulus Reflex and Cable Ready! Carambus is a server-based web solution with a single-page feel and scoreboards!

Starting in 2024, AI support with tools such as Cursor, LLM models from Anthropy, and OpenAi brought a whole new dimension to software development. It turned out that the structure of the Ruby and Rails environment, based on well-defined standards, was excellently suited to being understood by AI. This made it very easy to make complex enhancements to the system and documentation that I would never have tackled otherwise due to lack of time.

Dr. Gernot Ullrich

Ullrich-IT-Consulting