MICHA.ELMUELLER

Like last year, I have compiled a list of books which I have read throughout the year.

Scott Rosenberg — Dreaming in Code
The book describes the tale of a talented, experienced and rich software engineer with a vision for a large piece of software: a personal information management tool which is distributed, secure and supports any kind of information. He assembles a team of genius programmers and they try to fulfill his vision.

Well… so far so good. The long story short: the project was basically aborted after 8 years with practically no outcome, even though it had perfect prerequisites. A similar story can be found in a lot of software projects and the book shines some light on the process of wrong going. It is written by a journalist who accompanied the company from the start. For 2-3 years he sat in a lot of meetings and interviewed a lot people; after this period it became very unclear if the company would ever make it to a product and thus he left.

I found the book a very nice read. As an external observer I read the book in helpless despair, watching the project go mad. In a lot of ways I could relate to my own experiences in projects with other students. Some of my highlights: after two years of still not having anything to show, the developers decide for the third or fourth time to rewrite their backend once again. At this point they still don’t know for sure if the general idea will even work. Once a designer is finally brought into the project to create a user interface (after two years straight into the project) it turns out that a lot of backend things will have to be done differently. The book also shows quite clearly that each newly hired expert sees the project as a mean to fulfill his own life goals. That’s why after a couple of years into the project there is still no prototype, but three or four huge side projects that have very little to do with the initial goal of the project (e.g. the standardization of calendar formats and an entire standalone database software).

The book reminded me of the importance of prototyping as fast as possible in order to fail early and fast. The book also illustrates that projects need management: since the developers were all outstanding experts, no one wanted to tell anyone how to do stuff.

Michael Crichton — Jurassic Park
This book was an awesome read and got it me excited about the Jurassic Park series again. I was surprised by how much it differs from the movie.

Michael Crichton — The Lost World
A nice read, though not as excellent as the first book. There was no necessity to write a second book.

Ashlee Vance — Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
The (authorized) biography on Elon Musk was an interesting read. I disliked that the author sometimes seems to glorify Musk a bit. Perhaps this is the American mentality. Words like “work-life balance” seem to have a negative connotation in the context of this book.

Robert A. Heinlein — The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
This book got my attention after I watched a Q&A with Elon Musk and he mentioned it as one of his favorites. After reading a bit about it, I found that it was often mentioned as one of the best science-fiction books ever written. Reasons enough for me to read it. Heinlein describes the rebellion efforts of a small colony on the moon. The rebellion is planned in a very clever way (which explains the books popularity in the anarchy scene). I found the book quite entertaining and inspiring (not in an anarcho way, in a technological way ;-)).

Stephen Davies — Hammer of the Gods
The book aims to tell the story behind “Led Zeppelin”. I found this copy whilst poking around in a second hand bookshop in Thailand and it got me interested. From what I have read about the book, not every tale or story from it should be taken for granted, as the author seems to not have done an entirely proper investigation. But the book is an interesting and informative read and I guess even if all the anecdotes in the book are incorrect, there is still a lot of (authentic) information left on how the band got together and came to its success. It certainly gave me a new perspective on Stairway to Heaven, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

Tony Wheeler, Maureen Wheeler — Unlikely Destinations: The Lonely Planet Story
This book is an “autobiography” on the Lonely Planet. Tony and Maureen describe how they founded the company and its following success. I stumbled upon this book in a small bookshop in Bangkok and it got me interested immediately. Only after buying and unpacking I realized that it was pirated. The color-copied cover didn’t give much clues, but the pages themselves were clearly copied — dirt marks, slightly rotated pages, etc.. Well, at least the pirates also copied the copyright and licensing information page of the book…
The book itself contained some interesting infos and some nice anecdotes, but in total I found it had some long parts where the overall story got lost in boring details.

Wolfgang Beltracchi — Selbstporträt
I got first interested in the author after reading an interview with him a couple years back (I think it might have been this one). Basically, Beltracchi was an art forger until not so long ago. A very good one, one should mention. He never copied existing paintings, but rather made an effort to understand the workings of an artist and immerse himself in the person. He then went on to create “new” paintings, which did fit very well in the repertoire of an artist. Beltracchi did very well and remained undiscovered for a very long time. This book is his (and his wifes) autobiography. The book was a rewarding and very good read.

Andy Weir — The Martian
Very entertaining, liked it. Haven’t seen the movie (yet).

Christoph Warmer, Sören Weber — Mission Startup
The book is a collection of interviews with German startup founders (mymuesli, fritz kola, Vapiano, mytaxi, etc.). Some interviews were interesting to read and the book offered nice insights into the German startup scene.
What really annoyed me about the book is that it is typeset in such a careless way. Questions which sometimes are bold and sometimes not and a gruesome usage of word spacing.

Stephen King — On Writing
Another biography! The book consists of two parts: Part 1 describes autobiographical details and Part 2 consists of notes on writing and becoming a writer. It seems to me (after reading Mr. Kings Wikipedia page) that he left out a great deal of biographical details. Whilst reading I oftentimes had the impression that he is reluctant to write about himself and is rather eager to get to Part 2. Nevertheless, the book fostered my understanding of the person.

Sam Harris — Waking Up
Harris describes his personal experiences concerning meditation. This was an accompanying book to me starting meditating regularly again. The book contains a vast number of interesting information and I need to read it again, since I didn’t grasp everything the first time.

Neil Strauss — The Truth: An Uncomfortable Book About Relationships
Very good read, contains a lot of truth indeed. The book centers around the authors’ search for a fitting style of relationship.

Orson Scott Card — Ender in Exile
I don’t know how I could have missed that Card wrote many more books in the Ender universe besides the Ender Quartett (Enders Game, Speaker for the Dead, Children of the Mind, Xenocide). One of them is “Ender in Exile”. The book fits right in the (multiple thousand years) gap between “Enders Game” and “Speaker for the Dead”. I liked it, it was a rewarding read. I have started reading some of the other stuff in the Ender universe as well. Currently I am reading “First Meetings”, a short story collection with some Ender characters.

Ulrich Ott — Meditation für Skeptiker (“Meditation for Skeptics”)
Ott is (similar to Wolf Singer) a well known neuroscientist who researches meditation. This book is a scientific (but well understandable) report on the state of research concerning meditation. The author gives a very broad overview over the topic and describes in detail which commonly postulated advantages of meditation have a scientific base and which not. It was an interesting read and provided some helpful information to me.

To conclude the 2015 book list, I need to mention that there were some books which I didn’t finish: the book “Robert Bosch” by Gunter Haug aims to tell a fictional autobiography of Bosch. Therefore the author imagines thoughts and feelings of Bosch and enriches this with biographical details. I found this approach not working for me at all. The author presumes a lot of stuff about the inner workings of Bosch without any recognizable credibility.

The other book which I stopped reading — though I plan to complete it in 2016 — is “The Singularity is Near” by futurist Ray Kurzweil. It is a very interesting read and the reason for stopping was solely that I was not in the mood for something technical at that point in time.

I read all books (in total 15) in their original language — 13 were in English, two in German.

Together with Valerie I have been backpacking Thailand during September. It has been a very nice holiday and it was hard for me to go back to life in Germany after the holiday. This is mainly due to me being dissatisfied with how things have gone throughout this year. This was also the first holiday in which I switched off my smartphone completely. It was a real pleasure to not be reachable and to not use any computerized stuff. During the holiday I became more and more disgusted of using any computers or electronic devices. I also had to drop reading one of the books I brought with me, since it was too technology focused. I just couldn’t bring myself to carry on reading. Out of recent experiences at university, I have developed a mild aversion against technology and computer stuff during August and it grew stronger during the holiday. Once we were back in Germany it took me a couple of days and a real effort to turn the smartphone back on and go back to working with a computer. Even now, a couple of weeks after the holiday, I am still not back on the original track.

Once I tried turning my smartphone back on, I realized it had broken down somewhere in Thailand. This is probably due to the high humidity there and a couple of deep scratches which were in the screen. Probably the moisture crept in and the electronics broke down. I am thinking seriously about not getting any new smartphone at all. I was a heavy user of WhatsApp, Google Hangouts, Twitter, Instagram and Facebook before, but now it just disgusts me. Besides this it was a very nice holiday and an opportunity to get away from todo’s, deadlines and concerns.

We landed in Bangkok, but — since its Bangkok — left with the next night train to Surat Thani. Our destination was the island of Koh Phangan, where we stayed for ten days or so. Exploring the island, staying in different places, just drifting around. We rented motorbikes several times and spent entire days just driving around and exploring this tropical island with its beautiful landscape of beaches, coconut trees and palms. There were a lot of small adventures during those days and I enjoyed this time very much. At one point we discovered a small festival hidden in a secluded bay: the Floating Man, a small sibling of the Burning Man.

After staying some nights on Koh Phangan we went to the Ang Thong National Marine Park, a foreclosed group of islands, for some days. Few backpackers know that there are some bungalows and tents in the national park and that one can stay there for the night(s). As a consequence we had a nice time and the park mostly to ourselves. During the day, at around 10 am, some boats with tourists would arrive. But before that it was a nice secluded area where we could observe wild (and shy) monkeys strolling through the lonely island in the morning. In the afternoon at around 4 pm the tourist boats would leave again and the island would quiet down again.

Eventually we found a boat which went to Koh Tao and got on board. Koh Tao is an island famous for its diving resorts. Even though we didn’t dive, we took the time to snorkel and stayed there for the remainder of our journey. This was a nice time, accompanied by driving around with motorbikes, snorkeling and Yoga classes.

To quickly recap some other highlights: it should be a commonly known poor-country-travelling fact that the backpack which you store in the luggage facility of a long-distance bus will most certainly get thoroughly searched for valuables. Thus you should keep all the interesting stuff with you. I adhere to this and have never gotten anything stolen. This time though, after leaving the bus and unpacking my backpack in a room later, I found a pair of sneakers (Vans, size 46) buried deep in my backpack. I guess somebody mixed things up whilst unpacking and repacking. I didn’t have anything missing though. Sadly, by the time I discovered the shoes it was too late to return them to its rightful owner. Also sadly, I got size 43.

We had an interesting experience (not worth repeating) when we took a bungalow in a quiet place nearby a jungle. Since it was very hot we opened all windows and went swimming in the ocean nearby. When it got dark we got back to the bungalow. Well…here comes some foreshadowing clue: many places in Thailand (especially on the islands) have power only available for a certain period of the day — when it gets dark. A previous owner of the bungalow must have left the light switched on. We didn’t notice this when we first got to the place, since it was midday and the power was off. But as we returned, the bungalow shined like a christmas tree.
Since this very evening I can’t figure out why there are zoos in Thailand. From my point of view it is sufficient to just take a room and leave the light on.

During the semester break I was involved in the redesign of a computer science lecture for undergraduates (mostly in their second semester). The lecture is centered around programming topics, such as patterns or object-oriented programming and builds upon the lecture “Introduction to Computer Science”, which teaches basic programming skills in Java (amongst other stuff).

In the week before the semester started the idea of conducting the FizzBuzz test with the undergraduates came along. FizzBuzz seems to be a popular game in schools within the UK and has gained infamous popularity, since some people started to use it during job interviews as a test for developers. The task seems to be quite simple, but more people than you might think do not get it right when asked to write it down on paper without any debugging utilities.

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

Now you might think “Pfffhh! I can do that!”. Well, you might want to try that out before reading on. So we decided to conduct this test with the undergraduates in the mentioned course. The goal was to gather a better understanding of their problems and common mistakes. They were required to program the test in Java. The FizzBuzz test was the second task of the quiz, the first consisted of writing a simple class with a constructor and creating an instance of it. The quizz was not rated, the purpose was just to gather a better understanding of the students previous knowledge and problems.

I quickly want to highlight the most interesting results concerning FizzBuzz: of the 176 participants 28 students (16%) made no mistake at all. Leaving minor errors (syntax, type, assignment, etc.) out, five more students (19%) got the task right. 40 submissions (23%) had so much stuff missing, that they couldn’t be rated. Of the 33 students who got the task right (not taking minor errors into account), 21 reported having some programming experience before starting to study.

21 students (12%) made an off-by-one error similar to this: for (int i = 1; i < 100; i++) { ... }.
81 students (46%) made logical errors, along the lines of composing the if-conditions wrongfully. Wrongful code like this was very common (pseudo-code intended):

if (i % 3 == 0) print("Fizz")
else if (i % 5 == 0) print("Buzz")
else if (i % 3 == 0 && i % 5 == 0) print("FizzBuzz")
else print(i)

Note that the third if-condition will never get invoked. One reason for writing down the if-conditions in this order might be that the exercise text described the cases in this order. It seems to me that the most failure-prone (but also most obvious) approach to the task might be to directly translate the exercise description into code.

The results of this quiz were discussed with the students in the second lecture.

The infamous “Questions?” slide in SQL-Syntax

A while ago I got bored by the standard “Questions?” slide, which is in almost any presentation nowadays. So I thought about how to create more interesting questions-slides, which could maybe even make the audience smile. These are some of the slides I have come up with and used within presentations. Those presentations were usually directed towards a technical audience and the technical hints should have been clear.

JavaScript

C

Lambda Calculus

For a Psychologists Audience

Shell

Erlang