The IT Student Blog

After a long summer and a long break from this blog… school is about to begin again.

SO it’s time to fill up your cup with hot coffee, plug in your machine and start absorbing new information. A fresh start! Now you’ve got the chance to do all your assignments on time, pre-order the new course literature, be the first to borrow what you need in the library and avoid the snooze button in the mornings (as the mornings are still quite sunny, and it’s nice to get up).

As to all the new students…

My absolute best advice for you guys (including everyone else) is to start up with things early. Even though you might get a soft start… do pick up your books. Google the things you don’t understand. Ask questions. Be curious. And never underestimate the power of Wikipedia. Keeping yourself up to date is invaluable.

Time flies and the exams always come faster than you think… so start up your work right away and you will increase your chances of surviving itu.

Act NOW, tomorrow might be too late. You don’t want to catch up with re-exams, trust me.

I wish all new students good luck with their studies and don’t run away if the more experienced guys talk about stuff you haven’t heard of when you’re having your first lunch breaks. Eventually you’ll undestand just as much… or even more. Just hang in there. Be cool. Keep on reading.

One of the major issues with writing a thesis is not writing the thesis itself. Reading articles, evaluating methods, hacking some scripts, all parts comes together pretty nicely at one point or another. No, actually writing a thesis is like talking a walk in the park. As long as you have unlimited resources that is. Obviously you never have.

My problem is time, and more precisely time management. Looking at my calendar, there is only two or three important dates that I need to handle with care and those are months away. Yet, all of us who are currently writing our theses know there’s a tremendous amount of reading articles, evaluating methods and hacking scripts before that date. People from all over the world offer advice on how to deal with personal planning, ranging from simple Todo-lists to more complex methods like Pomodoro. No method has received much of my attention. I don’t believe there’s a way that suits all. I prefer regularity, therefore I go to uni everyday and use it as my “office.” At least the chance of meeting intelligent and inspirational people are order of magnitudes greater here compared to staying at home. Which helps.

We’re lucky we’ve got a place to work all days, not all students have I’ve been told. Therefore, my second source of inspiration comes from reading. One of the best things about studying is the wealth of information that you encounter everyday. A subset of my read items today include: Chatroulette and GeoIP tagging, ‘Pay it forward’ pays off, How much has Scala influenced Erlang, to mention a few. Ironically, it’s also my single biggest source for distraction. None of these articles directly contribute to my thesis work. There is, however, a subtle sense of achievement in broadening horizons. Regularly it turns out that after reading an article inspiration is blooming and all of a sudden I’ve burst out another two or three paragraphs on some writing that I just got to do.

Creswell suggests in his book “Research Design, 3rd Ed.” that you should take 30 minutes each day to just write. Ignore your mood. Clear your mind and just write. When you cannot write what you intend to write, write about something else. Right now my RSS is empty and there are no interesting tweets waiting, and you’ve figured, I got to write. So I write this.

How do you cheat your motivation?

Update 22:09
I just read this blog post maybe that’s the key?

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.

I’ve been thinking way to long about a follow-up post on the workspace at the IT-university and been pushing it off for way to long now. Then I read this quote from 43 Folders and decided to just start! (I didn’t even finish 43′s blog post)

“Every time you sit down to write represents a new chance, and I really encourage you to make yourself see it that way. That means set aside the time (with a beginning and end, if possible), take it seriously, and, most importantly, try not to think. Thinking is not writing; thinking is thinking. Thinking does not make books.”

Unfortunately this post will not be as encouraging as the last one.

1st and 2nd year students

During the first year of the Software Engineering and Management programme there are plenty of group rooms available and when there are no on-going lectures the square is also heavily used. Since the square is dedicated to SEM 1 students only there are never any complications with colliding schedules. The latter applies also to the second year of SEM. One square, one class. The major difference is, however, that there are no more separate group available for students to use (no more in this sentence means on the 3rd floor where the SEM students reside). Instead, all group activities are forced to the square, or some other floor in the ITU building.

3rd year and master students

Are not as lucky as the 1st or 2nd year students. Instead around 50 3rd year students and another 50-60 master students share one square in which lectures are organised almost daily but rarely addressing all of the ~110 students. This is due to the change in the way the programme is organised in the later years. What’s more? No group groups.

Space addicts?

Considering there are two more floors available there should be space enough for everyone? After a quick count I’m down to two available group rooms which should be booked in advance across the two floors. Not a lot. There used to be more but these have been converted into office spaces for permanent staff and guest professors. As argued in the previous post, the squares are a phenomenal working place which stimulates creativity and enhances collaboration. But, it is not suitable for all occasions, and moreover it is frequently booked for lecture purposes.

No, these days we’re space deprived. ITU is, and has been, my workplace of choice. I want it to be that way until I graduate.

A few weeks back I had the following conversation with an old classmate on Facebook about our free fuel, coffee:

E: Ursäkta?!?! Free?? Vilket uni går du på?? (Excuse me?!?! Free?? Which uni are you attending?)

Me: E, Yupp – free selecta-machine coffee! Det är nice, men som sagt… inget slår färskbryggt. (That’s nice, but ofc, nothing beats newly brewed)

E: Okej, jag sadla till IT uppenbarligen. I Örebro har de uttrycket “Ocker som i tolv spänn koppen”. (Okey, I should change to IT apparently. In Örebro we use the expression “Usury as in 12 kr per cup”)

Me: Å andra sidan kanske det inte smakar svart gift? (On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t taste like poison?)

E: Bekant med uttrycket “gratis är gott”? (Familiar with the expression “Free is good”?)

And then I realised I had just finished another conversation about how extraordinary it is to have free coffee available!

Over my two years at uni I have still to find one other university in Sweden which offers their students free coffee. Admittedly I often use it for bragging about ITU and it often feels like I’m pointing a finger in my opponents eye. While continuing to describe the luxury available to us they not too rarely end up convinced they should have gone into IT instead.

Now all this is going to go away. By 2010 there will be no more coffee advantage.

While I understand that universities should not be compared solely on their ability to provide their students with free coffee, it is one of those things that makes ITU special and somewhat geeky. By removing the coffee machines the university will loose one (out of several I hope) competitive advantages.

So what is the reason for this sudden change? Watch this:

Not a clean kitchen (by mett)

Evidently the administration/teachers/other staff, who also uses the coffee machines, are tired of finding the kitchen in this state. I admit, so am I, and many with me. So what’s stopping students (and staff?!?) to bring their own coffee machines? According to insurance (or safety) rules these are not permitted on the premises. Eventually, we’ll all have to pay for our coffee like at any other Swedish university. How boring.

Students, get your act together:

• put your cup in the washing machine after you’ve used it
• help empty a washing machine once in a while
• remind your friends to do the same

and together we can show the administration once again that ITU actually is a kind of cool place to study at.

Ps. I forgot to say thanks to those I regularly see cleaning up in the kitchen (they refers to both students and staff)

Don't sweep documentation under the mat (by londonmatt@flickr)

During my summer internship at Erlang Training and Consulting Ltd I’m co-developing a tool for tracing, debugging and checking correctness of large distributed system. The tool, which hasn’t got a name yet, is built on another application part of the Erlang/OTP called Inviso. The task itself is part of a large research project called ProTest where several parties are involved (one of them is the IT-university).

However, something struck me today. The lack of formal documentation, especially that of requirements. What is it that is expected of the tool? And in turn from me? As it turns out, I spent most of yesterday (read: Monday) contemplating, tweaking, experimenting, crushing many many ideas. It felt as I were getting nowhere. I certainly didn’t if we’re counting lines of code produced (except for some ridiculously simple QuickCheck tests and some cleaning of previous work). Yesterday wasn’t really the first day with a similar feeling, the “where is this supposed to be heading” question has been with me almost from start. Would it have helped with some formal documentation? Most certainly!

Although I don’t necessarily suggest that formal documentation means long boring documents covering endless of pages, but having externalised the goals certainly improves to someone else’s ability to contribute efficiently to a project. Documenting your work may be stealing your time, but in the long run, it allows you to excel past your first goals.

In my opinion, documenting:

• helps you think through your work
• enables other to contribute
• allows everyone to stay focused on the task at hand
• and acts as a back-up, a knowledge base

But there’s a balance to everything. Someone said it before me: software development is hard, but jolly good fun!

The no-name tool is to be demonstrated at a meeting in October, more than a month after my internship here finishes. But before that much more has to be done and days are flying fast!

Finally, to the students, don’t fall asleep when the teachers are talking about documentation, please.

* Coincidentally I also found this article through Hacker News today about why software engineers doesn’t document.

** The image is a photo of a grafitti work by an artist’s calling himself Bansky, no one knows who he is, but his work is cool!

Up and down by Mi Pah@flickr

Cia has talked about it before here on the blog. Sometimes things doesn’t really go as we’ve planned. The road always has its ups and downs. Thus, as you probably will have noticed, the blog has been down for a few weeks.

The blog is hosted in a virtual machine, on a server at ITU, which since it is summer time is abandoned of its students. Furthermore, since the servers are maintained by students the consequence was a slight delayed in getting it back on-line.

Luckily, it was just a matter of starting the server again. Maybe we should also start thinking about back-ups! More posts should be coming soon!

Ubuntu Linux by phylevn@flickr

The never-ending war. The free vs the proprietary. The scattered vs the one. The culture vs the company. GNU/Linux vs Windows. Hesa, one of the teachers at ITU, wrote a blog post about students preferences concerning their operating system and programming editor.

Needless to say, these are the two things which probably have caused the vast majority of all flame wars to date. The possible exception might be Nikon vs Canon. And so it was with great pleasure I read his post and quickly recalled the first few days of uni. Coming from a GNU/Linux background I found it remarkable to be the only one in my class running it. Out of a 100 people I would expect at least(!) one more to run a Linux based os. Well, except a few people who insists on running Mac!

Why I choose Linux
Personally I started using Linux on the server side sometime during 7th or 8th grade. I began tweaking with Gentoo and spent an unimaginable amount of hours on only getting the OS installed! All this happened on some old Pentium I which I had around at the time. Compiling the kernel took a mere 8 hours if I recall correctly.

Time moved on, Gentoo got replaced by FreeBSD on the server, and instead I started using Gentoo on my desktop computer. However, while not fully satisfied with all the applications I kept dual-booting for quite some time. It wasn’t until my computer got old and basically too slow for Windows that I migrated to Linux completely. There was no chance I could afford a new computer and with Linux I could get the latest software on the same hardware as before.

Today, despite having a new computer I’m still on Linux, more precisely Ubuntu, and it suits me perfectly! Maybe it isn’t faster than Windows or OSX but it works faster for me. In fact, when I’m back in Windows these days it makes me as a user feel stupid.

Making your pick
As students in IT I believe it is our job to be familiar, no I would even say be comfortable, with more than one operating system. As software engineers we should satisfy expectations of our users. We do that by understanding them.

Start a flame war with yourself! Question your choice of operating system, irrespective of whether it is Windows, Linux, OS X or some obscure dialect of Lisp. Find out what you like and be ready to motivate it. That’s what counts.

Hesa’s statistics shows that SEM students are exploring alternatives to Windows and I’m very happy to see this. It shows we’re open and ready to understand the ones we will work for!

What is the motivation behind your choice of operating system?

Ps. Just to clarify: I’ve worked with Macs too.

Keep it clean around you. Clean spaces are good, because your eyes are more likely to stay on the task you’re doing. Having a mess around you will cause a mess in your head as well.

Drink water. Keeping your brain in a cool bath of fluids really helps it absorb more information.

Make it fun. Taking notes in coloured pens or listening to music can really help eliminating the dull atmosphere that comes with strict studying. Eating candy is also a good thing as you will associate your studies with something you like.

Take small steps. When there’s too much to do, it’s easy to just make it worse by not knowing where to start and thus lose control over the situation. When losing control you’re more likely to give up. But instead, try starting out taking small steps. You’ll then see that small steps take you far and in the right direction.

Try your best. If you think that you’ll fail your exam or what else it may be, you will do so. That attitude makes you give up already before you have given it a chance. But by trying you’ll always get nearer and nearer a pass. And even though you might fail the first times, you have gained knowledge during the way there and it will get easier for each time you try.

Once in a while I usually find myself in a discussion about productivity. The topics covered so far is broad and it is everything from that nifty python script to what kind of programming fuel you should take. Another not so uncommon discussion is about work environment.

First, let me give you a quick description of the facilities we have at the IT-university which I must say are very pleasant. The university is located in the midst of numerous respectful IT-companies (such as Ericsson, Sigma, and Findwise to name a few). Nearby are also several upper secondary schools where I think Ester Mossesson’s gymnasium is the most visited one by university students as they have a bakery with awesome “fika.” University staff, students and faculty is housed more specifically in renovated buildings originally used for building ships and today owned by Chalmers and part of Lindholmen Campus.

Cafées are perfect for reading and writing blogposts

What about the inside then? In the case of the Software Engineering and Management programme all bachelor students are found at the top floor. Each year has their own “square” and a number of group rooms to go with them. We have our own kitchen with plenty of microwave ovens for everyone and not that many forks (I’ll give you the fork-story another day). Due to the “square” idea students work in an open environment with plenty of possibilities to exchange wild ideas.

Obviously, working in open environments have both its advantages and disadvantages. It is amazing how quick ideas are shared, spread and elaborated upon when so many active brains are in the same square! Lately, however, I’ve found myself distracted by the working atmosphere all too often. It is not so much about lack of productivity, more so it is my creativity which is hampered. And for those of you who didn’t know already, programming is a lot about creativity. Thus, in my case when creativity is inflicted upon my productivity level decrease.

So I started a social experiment with myself and investigated areas where I can place my self in a “creative mode”. It turns out that environment is closely linked with what tasks at hand. Here is a list of a few tasks that I commonly do these days:

• Managing my mailbox: train or bus (I’m not used to my current mail load so it tends to get messy once in a while)

• Writing blog posts: café or other public space

• Updating the project’s Software Design Description: kitchen table

• Programming: Norton’s coffee corner (a corner of our square)

So, the open environment, the square; what happened to that? If found it to be a corner stone in my day-to-day communication. An equally important but perhaps less obvious task which doesn’t always come for free.

I wonder what it would have been like without our squares? Do have other examples of communication squares?