CDU party heads call for state-Coursera

The policy proposal described here by the German IT site golem.de is at the same time surprising and at the same time really not: The heads of the CDU, the biggest party in Germany, calls for a state-Coursera.

The platform is to be government run and each course has to be government certified. Apparently, they want to use 10% of the nations education budget for it. 3 billion per year. The proposal states that the existing on-the-job education offerings, e.g. for learning a new software framework, were too convoluted and not all certified by a government agency. "Convoluted" is German for "organized by competition". The term is always used when there are more than three competitors in a market. Oh, it is so convoluted, they start to shout. So, this has to change because "Germany".

As always, 5-10 years too late? This clearly already exists and wasn't too successful after an initial hype. At least, I would call it bold to promise 10% of the education budget towards this.

Catchup 2012-2014

Two years since the last blog post. The last entry was „Farewell Bay Area“ written when I left the Bay Area after the internship.

Let’s catchup:

When I arrived at the airport on August 1st 2012, the first call was to colleague to ask about the state of the dedupv1 project, just to hear that it was killed for all intents and purposes during the three months of the internship. Very sad, but not having to write code that "actually works" gave me time and freedom to experiment. The other insight was to use trace-driven simulations instead of the real system for early prototyping of research ideas. The result was a nice paper chain: November 2012 (Supercomputing, Salt Lake City, Utah), February 2013 (FAST, San Jose, CA, to my knowledge the first European PhD student ever presenting at FAST), July 2013 (SYSTOR, Haifa, Israel) and two more not so important/good papers. Having the final paper at SYSTOR in Haifa was awesome because I could end my academic publication career at the venue where I started it in 2009 and the BLC approach presented there has been IMHO my best work (yet ;-)). Graduation in May 2013.

I joined Greenplum where I did my internship. It had now joined forced with other parts of EMC and VMware in a company called Pivotal in June 2013. Let’s make a long story short: I love the product (GPDB). It has great potential. MPPs in general (Massive Parallel Databases) are increasingly the way to go for Big Data analytics. The potential of the 1990’s research is now finally materializing. Also, lots of new innovation happening in the field. However, Pivotal was not my place anymore. Greenplum will always be important to me because they were the first where that have me a chance. I left in October after finishing the project to join Pure Storage in November 2013. Back in (block) storage and Pure is awesome.

I have been working from the London sales office since November. I like England. On good days, it feels like a cultural mixture of the US and Europe that I like. It is mixing „individualism with universal healthcare„ as a friend on mine worded it. Politically/philosophically I have always been more influenced by British authors (Locke, Smith, Mill, Popper, Keynes,....) than continentals/Germans (Hegel, Marx, Adorno, Heidegger, ....).

As I evidently researched and published a lot data deduplication and this kind of technologies are important for Pure and (some more reasons and some persistence), we have been able to petition of a visa. In three weeks I am going to say „Hello again, Bay Area“. Let’s start a new chapter....

Farewell Bay Area

The most important things this weekend are packing and having farewells with everybody.
The internship is over.

In the end, it was a great time. Maybe one of the most interesting summers I ever had, certainly the one with the best weather.

Working for a database company worked out surprisingly well, given that I have no formal database background. My theory for this is that all software-intensive storage systems, where I would include data deduplication systems, distributed storage systems, and database storage layers, are driven by the media (usually hard disks, Flash storage). Whatever the user interface is, the way you design algorithms, how you try to make your IO pattern optimal, the basic building blocks for concurrency and fault tolerance are all the same. The basic skills (coding, data structures, design) of an engineer are the same. Therefore it doesn't really matter if the upper levels are SCSI or SQL. We are driven by the media.

It was great that my work was really appreciated. I worked on the design and the prototype of a novel storage layer and on test infrastructure as a side project. Both are topics I really like.

The last week was really helpful because multiple people including professional recruiters looked over my resume and gave line-edits. While my resume followed the U.S. style, it contains many formulations   let recruiters trip. For example, I wrote "With Honors" as English transaction of "Mit Auszeichnung" (the highest grade we have), but "with honers" is the U.S. equivalent to "good" or even less. The resume is now in a much better shape. Otherwise the last week mainly consists of finishing the last pieces, handing over everything and painting the project name on a wall. Those who know me well, know that finding the name for the project was probably the most difficult task here.

The Bay Area is an awesome place. So many smart tech people. Literately everybody I spoke with about this had this favorite story about meeting somebody awesome and/or famous at a random place like a small book store. At work, there have been so many people with from these schools or these top companies or just tons of experience. Similar minded people who have to same attitude to coding/design or read the same professional books. It was interesting, I learned a lot, and I would like to work with these people or similar minded people again.

Also, there are so many interesting companies: The big ones, the middle ones, and the small ones. The change is high that if you have heard from a company or if you like like an app, it comes from within 30 miles from here. In the U.S. there is also the Seattle area and the Boston/Cambridge area, but still, here is it.

Have I mentioned the weather? Probably yes. Have I mentioned the great landscape here? Have I mentioned that in certain months you can go surfing in the Ocean and snowboarding at the same day?

I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to do the internship. To do one was probably one of the best profession decisions I made. I can only recommend it. Well, I recommend it if you are similar to me. For a suit job like consulting or non-tech management, it is not worthwhile. Search a company you like, that does something interesting, something challenging and go for it.

The living situation has been strange, much stranger then what I could imagine. So strange that it is not an appropriate topic for a blog post. However, the room mates have been great. Totally diverse people from (in alphabetic order) a sociologist that programs C to do this simulations, over startup kids, a philosopher, a former CS guy who switched to law, a bio medical researcher whose love to ice cream is only surpassed by Camaros and Froyo, to a rowing, hyper-competitive law student. And more law students and even more people. But the group worked pretty well. We have done something interesting (like class-4 white water rafting last weekend) nearly ever weekend. I certainly would have left the house without these people. Some of them will eventually end up back in the Bay Area. Hopefully, we keep the contact.

Tomorrow I move to an airport hotel and on Tuesday at 6am my plane leaves to Frankfurt. Then: Back to normal.

I think I have a few nice photos left, but the camera is already stored away.

Books I have read during the internship:

• The Design of Design, Fred Brooks
• The Algorithm Design Manual, Skiena  (I finally bought my own copy from my internship salary. It is necessary since I no longer have access to the decent University of Paderborn library)

• The Ph.D. Grind, Philip Guo (pdf)
• An Introduction to Mathematical Cryptography, Hoffstein
• Quite, Susan Cain
• John Adams, David Mccullough
• Undaunted Courage, Ambrose

2 weeks to go

3 month are pretty long. It is not so much work or the U.S., it is life in a dorm style environment is wearing me out a bit. Saturday, I took a day off. Nice solitude in the garden.

On Sunday, I was finally in San Francisco. Doing touristy things like Ferry Building, Pier 39, Fisherman's Wharf, Dim Sum in Chinatown. In the following a few nice photos:

The focus of the last week was networking or at last a try to do networking. I was at a BASE meeting on Monday. BASE stands for Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts where Scala is a nice programming language. I used it for example for to write tool which helped me to acquire the data for my Supercomputing 2012 paper. It were two nice talks, but no good networking.  Some people I talked to were strange guys "between jobs" (aka unemployed) that go to tons of meetups in the Bay Area to get free pizza and beer.
Tuesday: Beers with colleagues at a fish restaurant near work.
Wednesday: Wine tasting at Google's Mountain View office. That was really nice. Our Google law intern invited me. Thanks.
On Friday, I had a important presentation about the work I done during the last weeks. It went pretty nice. Afterwards I had good talks with different engineers. I meet a whole bunch of good, really skilled engineers. It is fun working with them. Free beer afterwards.

The weekend before that we were rafting a south fork of the American River. The river itself had much less rapids then the cache canyon a few weeks earlier, but better ones. A big advantage of this setting: The company, we rafted with, was so professional. The meeting place was clean and in good shape, the the guiding was per-boad, the self-prepared food for lunch: Good. What impressed most was the reaction when some fall into the water during a rapid. All the guides coordinated their boots within seconds so that was easy to pick the person up afterwards. We were pretty impressed so that we will do it again. This will be so much fun.

Why do we do so much? For two reasons: 1) there is so much fun stuff to do here in the area. 2) My internship salary is so much higher then my German university salary and I cannot buy e.g. fun gadgets without getting trouble with the German border robbery. So I spend a low percentage of the bi-weekly salary I buy fun experiences.

Another week in the Bay Area

The more time I spend here to more likely it is that I will return after finishing my PhD. If you are in tech, this is the place to be. Where else do you meet e.g. a (former) hiring manager of a few nice storage companies in the line of a bookshop? Work is interesting and there are quite a lot of smart and engaged people to work with. 

Doing the internship was a really good decision. Sure, I should have done this during the Masters time, but even at this late stage it is worth the time. I don't want to miss it.

But even how much I like the internship and the area, I miss a good couch, my car, the nice programming sundays while watching a TV series. Actually, it is easy to keep the contact with home, with friends and family. T-Mobile has a 10 USD for its prepaid mobile plan that allows calls to German phones with no extra costs. Skype and Mails help, too. The T-Mobile area coverage is hell (ok, this sentence is easy for sentiment analysis), but the add-on is really worth its money. 

I will fly out on 7/31 and arrive in Frankfurt the next day. Thanks to the bureaucracy of JGU, I have two weeks of holiday.

Ok, after these random thoughts, a few pictures and stories.

Last weekend was strenuous. I and a friend from the house went to Yosemite. For those, who are not that familiar with the U.S. Yosemite is a famous national park. After Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, I would say the third most known. And probably one of the most accessible. The park is around 4h east of the Bay Area. Five hours or more if you are stuck on 101 during the Friday evening rush hour. 

We went up to the top of the Yosemite water fall, North Americas highest waterfall. The so called "Upper Yosemite Falls Trail". If a site declares it was very hard, believe it. The trail was not long (less then 4mi), but the elevation gain was nearly a full kilometer. You can see good on these pictures. 

You start at the base level and you end up at the top of these falls.

You ping pong between the two rocks and crawl up the rocks on pretty rocky trails.

Actually, I found going down more difficult then up. Because you always look down and think about slipping and falling. "Height" is not really my thing. 

It was the weekend before independence day and therefore there was quite a traffic on the trail. I would guess around 500 people on that day. At some point, you start asking the hiker going down how much is left until you reach the top and they help with friendly words. Later, when you go down you also help with encouraging words.

Afterwards, we went to the Hotel. Bad surprise: "We don't have a reservation on your name". Not the sentence you want to hear after such a hike. Nice surprise: It later turned out that the Hotel was overbooked and they upgraded us to the Ahwahnee, a really good Hotel in Yosemite Valley. It is hard to describe how good the hotel is. Find it out yourself. The problem: If you don't have luck as we had, you are at above 500 USD per night. It is probably the best hotel I stayed in up to now. Before the Hyatt Lake Tahoe (MSST 2010) and Bayerpost in Munich.

The independence day was also really nice. It started with "Dim Sum", a special chinese kind of food. The restaurant was in Cupertino. But it felt actually like China, a nicer China. In the complete "mall", the direction sings have not been translated to English. This was for lunch. In the evening, we had a BBQ. And then we went to the near Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View for a concert of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Of course, with fireworks. 

It was really nice. The only issue: Parking. It took us two hours to get of the parking space. Thanks Mark for forgetting your badge for free parking.

There is so much left to do. I was only two times in Santa Cruz and I was not yet surfing. I really want to go surfing. And I was only a few times in San Francisco. However, weekend are running out very fast. This weekend, another rafting trip is scheduled. This times with the house group. We thought about going to the river where I have a few weeks ago. But we decided to go to another river where there is a guided tour. That will be fun. 

Internship Midterm Review

I have reached the middle of the internship. 5 weeks to go. 

I have noticed that the last blog post had much less reader then the posts before. As an advertisement, this new post contains a ton of new photos. Tons of new photos. However, Facebook users or Google+ users could already see the pictures of quite some time.

The major issue of the last weeks is the unfortunate situation in the house. Long story. Too long and not appropriate for a blog. At the moment it is ok. Lets hope it stays this way.

We have a lot of new people in the house. Actually, only a single house mate is the same as when I arrived. When I arrived, most people were German. Now all Germans are gone and have been "replaced" mostly by law associates. U.S. law students are not that different from lawyers in Germany (as I know them from politic times), but even more competitive. A bit like "Boston Legal" characters made reality. Two two-years are working for large law firms in the Bay Area, one first-year is with this company that also have a office in Munich, when you understand what I mean.

I still do much sports. At the moment, we as a group hike nearly every Saturday in national or state parks, monuments or shorelines.  We have been in Sequoia National Monument (Warning: Link contains Comic Sans). The hiking path was great. Big Basis state park with really nice waterfalls and at the Point Reyes National Seashore. The hiking distance increased from 8mi in the two weeks ago to 13mi yesterday. Always with a significant hills. Really exhausting, but the sights make up for it. Last weekend I was rafting with a college from work, who also studied at UPB and friends of him. Except that the other car of the group was part of an accident, in which thankfully nobody seems to be hurt seriously, it was a great weekend.

Here is a link to my picasse albums:

Here is a best photos of the hikes:

One of the best properties of the Bay Area is that you have all this great landscape around here. Forests/Redwoods all over the place. One hour and you are in a beach. A few hours to mountains for skiing, a few hours to more desert-like places, one hour to "The City".

The Palo Alto Baylands are still my favorite running place. I try to run there two times a week around 1h to 1.5h.

On a Sunday a few weeks ago, I finally have seen a U.S. sports event. College baseball. The final game of the season with Stanford Cardinals against Cal Bears. Photos available, together with a photo tour over the Stanford Campus.

The first half of the internship is over. This was fast. I feel like a part of the team. I am not a lesser part because of my intern status. This is good.


This week, I got knowledge that one of my co-workers is only working for the company part time and is a full-time tenured professor at a smaller east-coast university. I actually have read some papers from her.

It is a really interesting experience so far. The company seems to see itself -- much more then EMC in general -- as a Silicon Valley based company and I found that really nice. I finally got my company gear (Laptop bag, T-shirt, ...). My observation is the most acknowledged proof of success in the Bay Area is not a Rolex clock or a Armani suit, but the company T-shirt.

The internship is a large test to see if I would like to work in the Bay Area after finishing school. While my overall opinion fluctuates a bit, my mood is good. It is not unlikely that I will return. However, I will not do a final decision before returning to Germany. 

What are the plans for the next weekends? Next weekend, I will probably do a small trip to Yosemite National Park. It is a must-see and will be a great hike. In the week afterwards, I have a day off. It is the 4th of July. I will go to the Amphitheater in Mountain View, actually not more then 15 Minutes away by bike, to see the San Francisco Symphony orchestra playing to fireworks.