Blog

While surfing the Interwebs (looking at private cloud solutions - I plan to give a talk about that later in the year), I also looked at OpenStack. On their blog I stumbled upon the Zero to Book in five days post. A team of people had managed to write a 50'000 word book in just 5 days. As some of you may know, I have written a book too, but it took me 13 months to do so. Naturally I was intrigued and tried to find out more. The people used a process called BookSprints, a facilitated, structured process that takes the group from idea to finished book. ...

Much has been spoken about the pros and cons of pair programming. I have had the good fortune to pair program with some great programmers (Flöre and Kaspar come to mind) but it has always been difficult in the settings I worked in to actually do regular pair programming. I facilitated a couple of coding dojos (I know, I know - should do more…) I’m not going to rehash all the pros and cons of pair programming, and this entry is not going to be a learned discussion of it - just my experiences. ...

My iPhone is shuffling through my 20'000 or so tracks I have in iTunes - every day I get to hear around 30 minutes of music - often stuff I had forgotten I had or not heard in a long time. Today I got another dose of Frank Zappa - easily my favorite musician. I absolutely love this part of the lyrics of the song Packard Goose: Information is not knowledge Knowledge is not wisdom ...

A couple of weeks ago we had a photographer coming to our office - the technical HQ of Mobino. The result is the illustration to the current Bilan in an article about “The future of money” (not available online, but I will get a copy on wednesday) From left to right: Alvaro Fussen (senior developer), yours truly, JF Groff (CEO) and Chengchen Ji (our intern for the summer). Not only do we move money, we also do it in style… ...

Es hätte schlimmer kommen können. Til Schweiger als neuer Hamburger Kommisar bringe einen eher unrealistischen, Action geladenen Tatort. Keine Reflektion, kein Seelenstriptease, dafür viel rumgeballere und einige coole Sprüche. Trotzdem ist das bei weitem nicht so schlimm herausgekommen, wie zu befürchten war. Dennoch - ob der Tatort unbedingt US lastig (was den Munitionsverbrauch angeht) werden muss? Bis jetzt hat mir eigentlich ganz gut gefallen, dass die Tatorte wenigstens in Ansätzen den Anschein hatten, knapp etwas mit der Realität zu tun zu haben. 2011 wurden in Deutschland 36 Schüsse auf Personen abgegeben, davon 6 mit Todesfolge. Der neue Hamburger Tatort brauchte dafür gerade mal 90 Minuten… ...

Everyone with a teenage son will know that this species spends an incredible amount of time in front of game consoles and computers if left to their own devices. I don’t want to go into the fights we have with our son about his excessive use of electronics (after all, I am guilty of too much electronics myself). One thing however, that I have absolutely no understanding for - and that surprised me, when I found out is the following: ...