The following slides where created for my Talk “Not all those who wander are lost — Lessons from five years of learning and working remotely” for the Alumni Organisation of the Software Campus. They lose a lot of context without the actual talk but maybe they are of some interest. Abstract After COVID, many knowledge workers have some experience with remote work. With more and more jobs going back to pre-pandemic setups, it is a good time to look back and reflect on what worked, what did not work and which best-practices support remote working while mitigating its downsides....
I have heard PhD students are typically harsher reviewers for academic manuscripts than established researchers. They look for reasons to reject a paper, while more experienced reviewers look for reasons to accept. I lack the experience to say how true this is, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Academia can be a rough place. Method papers describe how perfectly executed studies should look, reading only accepted publications in top venues creates the impression that is how every paper must be and reviewer responses can be devastating....
Our paper “A Systematic Analysis of Problems in Open Collaborative Data Engineering” got accepted to the ACM Transactions on Social Computing (ACM-TSC). Abstract Collaborative workflows are common in open-source software development. They reduce individual costs and improve the quality of work results. Open data shares many characteristics with open-source software as it can be used, modified, and redistributed by anyone, for free. However, in contrast to open-source software engineering, collaborative data engineering on open data lacks a shared understanding of processes, methods, and tools....
Overview I am a big fan of separating a web client (typically as a single page application) from a backend that can be accessed using a REST api. The setup feels intuitive for me and can easily be extended for branching out into different clients, like mobile apps. For development, I package everything as simple as I can using docker and docker compose. Docker compose is a nice middle ground that is easier to set up and run than kubernetes but means you are already “halfway there” if you want to deploy into a k8s cluster later on....
Wanderlist One of my favorite ways to explore a new city are free walking tours in which a local guide takes you around the city, shows you interesting places and shares their knowledge with you. At the end of these tours, guides often share their favorite spots and ‘secret tips’ with you, usually as a way to keep contact or get you to follow their Instagram. We’d take these recommendations and, if there is time, plan some of our travel days around visiting them, eating there or whatever else makes sense....
The problem Interviews are great. You can learn a lot about a topic by talking to experts. If you are working on a product, talking to users is common advice. If you are a researcher, qualitative surveys using interviews are great fun. Transcribing interviews, however, sucks Doing it yourself is tedious and is a painfully acquired skill. Outsourcing work to one of the various transcription APIs also is no perfect solution....
I ask students that want to write a thesis with me to prepare an exposé (or project outline) before we start. For the student, this ensures they have an idea of the work involved and a reasonable timeline to complete it. For me, it provides a short overview about what we agreed on and highlights important deadlines. At a minimum, I think an exposé should be a roughly two-page PDF and include:...
Our paper “Challenges to Open Collaborative Data Engineering” got accepted to the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 2023 (HICSS 56). Sadly, we could not present in person due to a flight cancellation but we provided a short video presentation. Abstract Open data is data that can be used, modified, and passed on, for free, similar to open-source software. Unlike open-source, however, there is little collaboration in open data engineering. We perform a systematic literature review of collaboration systems in open data, specifically for data engineering by users, taking place after data has been made available as open data....
At the start of July, I visited the Softwarecampus Kickoff Event. The Softwarecampus is a project targeting self-described “EntrepreNerds” and sponsoring research projects with an industry partner with up to 100k€. Having been to a few ice-breaker events with fellow nerds I anticipated an awkward day but I was pleasantly surprised. In the hope of being pleasantly surprised again in the future, I wanted to share some ways the Softwarecampus team made the event stand out to me....
“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” - Phil Karlton AngularJS was released in 2010 and revolutionized modern frontend development. In 2016, the AngularJS team published a new framework, written in TypeScript and incompatible with AngularJS. They also made the baffling choice to call this framework Angular 2. Mayhem ensued, confused developers talked to each other about incompatible frameworks. The excellent community documentation AngularJS had built in the form of blogs and StackOverflow answers became an active hindrance for people trying to learn Angular....