The IT Student Blog

Time flies. Three years have passed since I began studying at the IT-university. Three pretty amazing years I might add! Having been interviewed twice about why I started at the Software Engineering and Management programme I’m still not sure I know or remember the answer. However, in retrospect I don’t really care either as it has been a perfect match and I’ve enjoyed (almost) every moment of it. And since this is my last blog post on this blog, allow me to explain why.

• Problem Based Learning (PBL) – Without a doubt the projects that we’ve carried out at the SEM programme has been the most rewarding, as well as the most demanding. Getting a group with members of extremely broad backgrounds to collaborate and produce quality results is as fun as it is challenging.
  

  Some dude (aka Jonte) enjoying the cleaning after a Christmas party

• Work space – I wrote about it last year and I got some harsh critique on the post in the lines of “How much did the ITU pay you to write that?” but I stand for every word I wrote. Having open areas, and areas in general, which students can go to everyday and basically use as an office has allowed, at least me, to pick up on questions, material and facts that I’m sure would have missed if I stayed at home.
• Flexibility – almost every course have allowed the students to, to some extent, choose their topic of specialisation themselves. Not only is it motivating, but it also allows me to early on discover which areas I’d like to follow up and perhaps specialise in.
• Diversity – roughly 60% of our class were foreigners. This provides a tremendous cultural experience. Enough said.
• Teachers – (and for my classmates reading, yes, I know it’s controversial) Actually we happen to have had the luxury of having Gothenburg University’s best teacher, Carl Magnus Olsson, as he was this spring awarded with the university’s finest pedagogical prize. However, without giving any names, we’ve also been unlucky to have some pretty crappy pedagogues and thereby also had the opportunity to practice our course evaluation skills.

Overall though, my ITU experience will be remembered for the amazing moments: hacking late nights with crazy and fun friends still somehow managing to deliver on-time, Emil Janitzek and my thesis writing, the crappy free coffee, the countless number of pranks a common result of either too much free coffee or too much intensive programming.

There’s tonnes more to say but it is time to move on. Many of my classmates are already busy earning money at various companies around Gothenburg, some are about to start any time, some are continuing to study. Myself, I’m continuing with an Erasmus Mundus Master’s degree in Distributed Computing starting as an exchange student in Portugal this autumn.

Two final remarks: One, if you have any questions feel free to contact me (marcus at quandoo dot se). Two, if you’re interested in blogging here contact me too and I’ll forward your request.

So long, and thanks for all the fish!

Using a background image to cover the entire slide

How should we otherwise communicate abstract and complex ideas that intrigues us, creates business, and changes the world. Most people are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the technical terms and the norms of the hacker community. It is our duty to convey intricate ideas, whether it be requirements, architectural decisions, or implementation details, in the clearest way possible.

Within the SEM programme presenting is common practice. Project work has to be presented for your classmates, supervisors and examiners. We are naturally nervous when those occasions are mandatory or the stakes are higher for whatever reason. There are many great authors and inspirational sources for making your presentations better on the Internet. Two of my personal favourites are Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen, and Nancy Duarte, CEO of Duarte Design and author of Slide:ology. But I thought I share a few of my own experiences when presenting within the SEM programme, both as a classmate and occasionally as a supervisor.

First, lets look at how I remember us starting out presenting and errors that I still experience today when watching presentations.

Using fonts effectively can help your audience focus

• Too many ideas are cramped in to one slide – message becomes unclear
• Poor use of imagery and visuals – slides are distracting rather than enhancing the presentation experience
• Presenter talks to the screen and not to the audience – the slides becomes the presenter’s notes

The answer to resolving all of above is seemingly easy to envisage. Then, despite trying to lead by example is it so hard to change? And here’s the catch; preparing a presentation takes time. A lot of time.  In preparation for the latest presentation that Emil and I held for our class we spent roughly 10 hours preparing the slides. Unfortunately, due to bad planning, we never had time to practice enough and the delivery was so-so. We survived on having presented together many times before.

As said earlier, in our field of study, we constantly have to communicate abstract and complex ideas. Visualising the how a three-tier layered architecture fulfils the stakeholders needs is not an easy task. Nevertheless, by inverting the points made above we get three good starting points.

• One idea – one slide. If the idea is too complex, spread it across several slides.
• Use images to explain and enhance. Flickr’s Creative Commons library has tonnes of useful imagery. The audience listens to your words, use the visuals to focus on the idea you’re communicating at that moment.
• Write your own notes and aim the slides to the audience.

Consider staging your ideas across several slides if content is too complex

Actually, that last point should be emphasized. Your words and your visuals should be chosen to suit your audience. Presenting for geeks allows you to use the vocabulary of geeks. Presenting for customers is a completely different thing. Think about your audience, and do it early, already when you start planning your presentation. Otherwise your audience will not understand what message you are trying to convey despite how interesting your content may be.

Now I hope this will inspire a few more students to drop the boring slides and start to present their already interesting content in a fashionable and compelling manner! As Jesper says: “copy-tweak,” start small, then move slowly and experiment. Once you’re out there [in the big world] it is a lot harder to test and the pressure and nervousness might be much higher. Finally, I’d also like to recommend a short introductory presentation that the Duarte team made for (and with) PowerPoint 2010. Watch it here.

Ps. The images in this post are taken from our latest presentation. A presentation about how organisations can improve “corporate communities” by adopting practices found in the free and open source communities.

My first keyboard

Robert Broberg, a Swedish artist, once wrote a song with the following paragraph “Det som göms i snö, kommer upp i tö” which roughly translates to “What’s hidden underneath snow, will show in thaw.” Since we actually have a white Christmas this year and most everything in my dad’s garden is covered in snow I thought it would be more wise to do some cleaning in my old room. It has basically been aggregating stuff over the years I’ve been living on my own, of which a large part is old computer hardware that’s been rendered unusable.

In the cleaning process I uncovered my first computer keyboard, later elegantly marked “UBC-Router 1″ short for United Broadband Clan which a friend and I created sometime in the very very early broadband days. This has been the keyboard for my router ever since the 28kbps modem served our house. (Yeah, for those older than me there was a time before 28kbps too but I’m not that old!) The router has been running various versions of GNU/Linux, including Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo (for a long time) and when the hard disk crashed, it was replaced with FreeBSD which it ran up until this summer when a lightning finally killed the whole thing. Poor bastard.

Dual CPU Sockets

There was also an old web/mail server running on a Pentium Pro. The motherboard supported two CPUs, however, I only ever acquired one, but it was definitely a killer. This machine was running Gentoo from the start to the very end. I hope to recover the data on these disks when I get back to Göteborg, who knows what crap I’ve been storing on them over the years?!

Today, my so called server room was transformed to its original purpose again. Its glory days are well exceeded, but it will be remembered as the place where I began experimenting and for taking me into a field in which I’m studying today. Who knows what I will uncover in years to come?

What have you found beneath the snow this Christmas? Do you already know where it has taken you or are you still waiting to find out?

The funny voice of Joker sounds in my head. Why so serious…
I wonder why? Why are people so bloody serious all the time?

I just learnt some complex concepts today that I’ve been struggling for a whole year to understand. It shocked me how easy it was! A good explanation was all I needed. After about five pages in a well written book, everything went from completely incomprehensible to crystal clear. Just amazing.

God bless good writers!

Sadly though, many people who “know stuff” tend to make things more complicated than they are. Especially when explaining to others. How come people love wrapping their sentences in words so advanced that one totally misses out on the actual information? A tough, technical subject doesn’t have to be taught in an academic way. It totally scares noobs away! I look at all the books I’ve bought and wonder why they are written in such a pretentious language. The covers of them look incredibly dull and I wonder if the publishing house hired civil engineers instead of graphical designers to do the layout.

Why so serious?

If it weren’t for the seriousness, the effectiveness of learning would most definitely increase.

What the hell… the server’s down. Again.

Right now no one has the energy to care for it. Lack of love quite simply

The words of Muppmat on my screen left me with no hope. No one cares for the server anymore, hence the disappearance of the blog. Ironically it reappeared just minutes after our little msn conversation. Why?

I don’t know why the server has been down for so long; nevertheless I want to make an apology to all the faithful readers out there who have been waiting for new posts. This is not due to uninspired bloggers, but to the server where the blog is stored. The server has lately not been treated with respect, and has consequently been feeling quite emo. As a result: the many attempts of frightening everyone with suicide attempts. Though, as we all know, this is not a desire for death, but a cry for help.

Please guys, take care of the server…

Blog 404 – Never More

Is there a coincidence that so many I’ve met at the ITU are weak for trance music? Or is it simply that computer enthusiasts also like the sound that’s made from them? Certainly there is at least one computer involved to create good trance music. I need to ask myself, could we survive without computers once we’ve fallen in love with electrical sounds? -Oh no.

There is something about the combination of trance and computing. It’s like what Jolt does for Dreamhackers, or what a Duracell battery does for a rabbit. It can’t really be explained, but if you’re one of those who enjoy that genre, you surely know what I’m talking about.

I remember saying this loudly in the lunch room one day, and the reactions were not what I expected. Apparently I ate my lunch beside a bunch of non-trance-fantasts. Archie looked amazed and said that I should write an academic article about it. Well, why not? I truly believe the magic about trance can be proven.  I also believe that trance can make you forget everything around you, keep you focused and as a result: make you code faster. One day I’ll really try to prove this! I mean, is there a coincidence too that trance is called trance?

Whatever the truth might be, I would like to recommend two of my most loved albums:

• Sub6 – Who Needs Love Songs?
• Braincell – Frequency Evolution

How come the IT-industry is so male dominated? There are always more men than women at IT-trainings. The SEM-programme is no exception. Has anyone heard of the opposite?

Sometimes it almost seems like women are incapable of handling a computers. Isn’t it sad that there is an award for women in computing? Why isn’t there one for men as well? Or is it really so fascinating when a woman succeeds to do anything useful in a male dominated area?

Nevertheless, the very first programmer is a woman.

Ada Lovelace: incredibly intelligent, excellent at both computing and mathematics, and still exceptionally feminine. Her wits have inspired generations of enthusiasts after her. She is an evidence of female potential. No wonder there’s a pillar with her name on it in the entrance hall at the ITU. I really hope she will ignite sparks in all the talented women out there, who are stopped by their sex.

Yesterday I saw this amazing documentary The Miracle of Love about the creation of human life. Although I’ve seen it several times before, it still astonishes me. How can a bunch of cells know how to build a human being? It’s incredible how a couple of stem cells just start constructing us. Some cells start making rhythmic movements, which later on build a heart. Some build the eyes and other cells are programmed to die, like the ones in our hands to create a space between our fingers.

The whole process is carefully planned in the blueprints of our DNA. In point of fact every detail of a new life.

Imagine how much information the DNA contains. I can’t understand how some microscopic twirled threads can contain so much information. It made me think of binary code. Just as the cells can read instructions from the DNA, a computer can read instructions from machine code. But I still wonder how a computer can know what millions of zeros and ones mean?

What if the future machine code would look like DNA? It certainly seems weird, but you never know what will happen next.