Be original

This week, I had the first week since a long time without business travels. So: time to take a deep breath and think about the world, the good, the bad and to check whether what I am doing is right or not !

I got also a new colleague our team + I am pleased to be the mentor for a student writing his bachelor thesis. I don’t think there is a way to learn more than enabling others. They ask questions you need to answer properly, they raise different points of view than your own.

During all this new aspects, I recognized again that – especially when working in big companies – it is important to be creative in what you do. If you are thinking too often that something could be done better, but it “is as it is”, you should change your way of thinking. That’s the only way how processes / presentations / products / cultural habits can improve.

I might treat this as a reminder for myself 🙂

sliced of citrus lemons — Photo by rawpixel.com on Pexels.com

design insights from outside

This evening, I was attending an event outside my SAP-branded tech world:

The KIT in Karlsruhe is hosting a symposium under the title “design with … A LANDSCAPE ORIENTED APPROACH” and today, Prof. Dr. Antoine Picon, Director of Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge (USA), was giving the keynote about “design with cities”.

fullsizeoutput_19ca — Prof Henri Bava kicks off the event @ KIT

Continue reading “design insights from outside” →

Digitale Transformation und die Menschen

Ich bin mittendrin in einem Prozess, der aktuell guten Gewissens als “Hype-Thema” bezeichnet werden kann: Digitalisierung.

Eigentlich beschäftige ich mich ja schon damit, das Leben meiner Mitmenschen digital zu machen. Sei es vor 100 Jahren die Installation des 56k Modem bei meinem Großvater, das Entwickeln einer Website für unseren Volleyballverein oder auch der heimliche Endgegner, die Neuanordnung der Senderliste auf einem Fernseher – ich war immer schon der Ansprechpartner für Fragen um “Digitales” im Alltag.

Es kommt mir natürlich ziemlich entgegen, dass genau dieses Thema aktuell scheinbar super gefragt ist, besonders auch bei Unternehmen. Während es für Privatpersonen immer einfacher wird, einen neuen Router aufzubauen oder eine App auf ihrem Smartphone zu installieren, sind Unternehmen immer noch in ihren komplexen IT-Prozessen gefangen, die sich so gar nicht mehr zeitgemäß anfühlen (hat hier jemand SAP GUI gesagt?). Continue reading “Digitale Transformation und die Menschen” →

Serverless computing

You know that I currently am investing effort in demystifying some of the buzzwords that are spooking around in the software development world.

After I did my first steps with running a Docker container, I now get my head around serverless computing, another term that I stumbled across several times.

The idea is quite simple and idealistic. Wikipedia says: Serverless computing is a cloud computing execution model in which the cloud provider dynamically manages the allocation of machine resources. Continue reading “Serverless computing” →

Docker – first container contact

I could use the time “between the years” to educate myself in a topic that I wanted to understand for a longer time: Docker.

Last year, I bought a book about it, so I knew it is something about containers and portable, scalable software development tools, but as long as you haven’t really put your hands on it, you don’t really know what’s going on. Luckily, there is a very good tutorial, directly delivered by docker.com: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/ that I played through in the last days.

Screen Shot 2017-12-28 at 12.44.21.png — if the docker whale is that happy, how can the software be bad???

I would like to share some of my findings here that I experienced throughout the exercise: Continue reading “Docker – first container contact” →

Siri, where have you gone?

I have to admit: I am pretty deep in the Apple universe.

Since I bought an iPad 2 for my studies, I am a big iPad fan. The portability of the device is just crazy, when I think what I can do now with my iPad Pro, that’s just incredible. For some travels, I can even leave my notebook at home because my iPad is covering the tasks that I need. Combined with the HDMI adapter, I can even do PowerPoint presentations, the Pencil is just amazing to review and comment documents that are sent to me.

An important component for that is actually Office 365 which enables me to access all my OneDrive-documents while on the road and edit them with Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I know I’m just writing down the marketing words, but it really works well. Of course, here is also room for improvement, but in general: it works! Continue reading “Siri, where have you gone?” →

Apple Watch 3 LTE

Let me say something about my first days with the new Apple Watch 3.

I was one of the early adopters when the first Apple Watch came out last year (yes, it was only 2016 when I bought Apple watch 1!) Back then, I was of course proud of my new gadget. At that time, you still felt like a Gadget-nerd when you had one of those smart watches. End of 2017, that kind of changed, no one is wondering why your watch is not showing the time anymore if you don’t raise your wrist, so your motivation to wear the watch should be another one. Continue reading “Apple Watch 3 LTE” →