Category Archives: Education

Rigor vs. Relevance, or: What is the Size of a Dissertation?

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While listening to a colleague’s talk the other day, I got an idea for a Ph.D. thesis (grant proposal). I wrote up a short summary and sent it to him. He thought it was fine but commented that it might be a bit “thin”. This made me wonder: How do we determine sufficient size of a dissertation, to stay with the metaphor of thin, so that we can conclude some research work is worth a Ph.D. title? Most university regulations require “significant” (read: non-trivial) scientific progress and then leave it to the advisor and the reading committee to determine whether a submitted dissertation fits the bill.

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More Upcoming Talks: Open Source Research

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I’ll be presenting the Open Source Research talk repeatedly over the next few months. The next three instances are in China, specifically:

  • Tsinghua University on March 17th, 2011
  • Peking University on March 18th, 2011
  • University of Macau on April 1st, 2011

After that it’s back to Germany.

New German Edition of Design Patterns (Entwurfsmuster) book (in German)

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Seit ein paar Monaten ist die neue Ausgabe des Entwurfsmusterbuchs verfügbar. Dies ist meine Übersetzung des Klassikers “Design Patterns” von Erich Gamma et al. aus dem Amerikanischen. Mit der neuen Ausgabe kommen einige Neuerungen und Änderungen. An erster Stelle zu nennen wäre der neue Umschlag:

Erster Vorschlag für den Umschlag der neuen Ausgabe

Der tatsächliche Inhalt der Sprechblase in der endgültigen veröffentlichten Fassung ist ein anderer und lautet: “We present you the book that changed software design.” Da die Viererbande (Gang-of-four) noch auf ein Nachfolgebuch mit weiteren Mustern hofft, habe ich Addison-Wesley’s ursprünglichen Vorschlag entsprechend geändert.

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Curating, Preserving, and Showing Software at the Computer History Museum

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Last Saturday I visited the Computer History Museum’s new exhibition “R|Evolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing”. The exhibition is fantastic, and they’ve come a long way from the early days of their “visible storage” exhibition. If you live in or visit the Silicon Valley, I highly recommend you pay it a visit.

That said, every time I visit the museum, I ask about the state of curating, preserving, and showing not only hardware, but also software. Like most exhibitions, the R|Evolution exhibition focusses on physical objects and complements them with textual explanations on plates as well as videos. Software is being discussed in the Software Theatre and in some smaller videos. However, these videos are about software and programming in general, not about actual software artifacts. Software is mostly shown through physical objects, i.e. the boxes they came in as packaged software.

Packaged Software Box Arc

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Honoring Peter Naur on the Community Wall at the Computer History Museum

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Last Saturday I visited the “R|Evolution” exhibition at Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum (more on that later). One reason why I went there was to see the “community wall” of plaques sponsored by small-time donors. I had sponsored one and my saying on it was:

In honor of Peter Naur: To program is to learn.

I’m sure Peter Naur is being honored by the CHM elsewhere and in a more appropriate style than my whimsical plaque, but I wanted to use this blog post to explain the plaque and the meaning of the saying on it.

Like every non-profit, the CHM is always looking for support and donations, and so they had called for financial support in late 2009 and promised a plaque on a community wall as a way of saying thanks for the support.

Community wall (of small-time donors) at the CHM, Feb 2011

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Das AMOS Projektkonzept (2011)

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NACHHALTIGE PROJEKTE ZUM LERNEN UND AUSGRÜNDEN

Dieser Artikel stellt das AMOS Projektkonzept vor, welches ich in der Informatik-Lehre an der Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg einsetze. Ziel des AMOS Projekts ist es, Studierenden professionelle Softwareentwicklung in einem konkreten Projekt zu vermitteln, welches idealerweise zu einer Startup durch die am Ende ihres Studiums befindlichen Studierenden führt.

Das AMOS Projekt ist für mich eine neue Erfindung: Ich habe es das erste Mal 2010 so abgehalten. Deswegen dient dieser Artikel nicht nur der Schilderung des Projektkonzepts, sondern sollte auch als Aufforderung zum Kommentieren gelesen werden. Ich vermute, dass es anderswo in ähnlicher Form betrieben wird und würde gern von den dortigen Erfahrungen lernen.

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The 2010 AMOS Project (from OSR Group)

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The AMOS Project is the Open Source Research Group’s main class, teaching students agile methods and open source practices. It is also part of my incubator for startups. We just finished the first year. For your convenience, here are links to the most recent and relevant blog posts on the 2010 AMOS Project.

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Linux-Tag Keynote Slides: A New Developer Career

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I just finished my Linux-Tag 2010 keynote and so I’m providing the talk slides here under the Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license. First title and abstract:

Open Source: A New Developer Career

Open source creates a new career ladder for software developers, orthogonal to the traditional career in software firms. Advancing on this career ladder can win developers broader recognition for their work, increase their salaries, and improve their job security. Software developers, project and hiring managers, and personnel departments alike need to understand this new dimension in a developer’s career. This talk explains the career and discusses what skills a developer should possess or train to be successful.

Then the slides as PDF or below embedded from Slideshare.

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Call for Open Source Dated Dec 12, 1968

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Ike Nassi, an Executive Vice President and my former manager at SAP, writes in an email:

By accident, while reviewing a very old CACM paper “Programming Semantics for Multiprogrammed Computations” by Dennis and Van Horn from March 1966 (!) reprinted in the CACM 25th Anniversary issue (Volume 26, Issue 1 (Jan. 1983) Special 25th Anniversary Issue) I found a letter to the editor from Galler et al. dated 12-DEC-1968 (“Proprietary Packages: a Point of View”) in which the authors call for what is essentially open source:

“… In any case, we believe that the protected nature of such a proprietary package and the fact that it cannot be examined and evaluated impartially imply that descriptions and evaluations of it deserve to be related as sales literature and by nature are not appropriate for professional publications. When a scholarly report on such work is published in a professional publication, all supporting data (and programs) which are referenced in a professional publication should be freely available to all readers, as is usual with such a publication …”

There were follow up letters on the same theme. I wonder if this is the earliest reference to the concept.

Ike may well be right and this may be the earliest reference arguing against closed source, at least in research. Pointers for earlier references, if there are any, are welcome! And yes, open source licenses had still to be invented…