Talk: Not all those who wander are lost

The following slides where created for my Talk “Not all those who wander are lost — Lessons from five years of learning and working remotely” for the Alumni Organisation of the Software Campus. They lose a lot of context without the actual talk but maybe they are of some interest. Abstract After COVID, many knowledge workers have some experience with remote work. With more and more jobs going back to pre-pandemic setups, it is a good time to look back and reflect on what worked, what did not work and which best-practices support remote working while mitigating its downsides....

January 19, 2024 · 2 min · 218 words · Philip Heltweg

Thank you reviewer 3

I have heard PhD students are typically harsher reviewers for academic manuscripts than established researchers. They look for reasons to reject a paper, while more experienced reviewers look for reasons to accept. I lack the experience to say how true this is, but it makes intuitive sense to me. Academia can be a rough place. Method papers describe how perfectly executed studies should look, reading only accepted publications in top venues creates the impression that is how every paper must be and reviewer responses can be devastating....

November 12, 2023 · 2 min · 288 words · Philip Heltweg

Softwarecampus 2022 - How to run a kickoff event for nerds

At the start of July, I visited the Softwarecampus Kickoff Event. The Softwarecampus is a project targeting self-described “EntrepreNerds” and sponsoring research projects with an industry partner with up to 100k€. Having been to a few ice-breaker events with fellow nerds I anticipated an awkward day but I was pleasantly surprised. In the hope of being pleasantly surprised again in the future, I wanted to share some ways the Softwarecampus team made the event stand out to me....

August 22, 2022 · 3 min · 467 words · Philip Heltweg

Who wrote this shit?

It is a beautiful rite of passage for a bright-eyed junior developer to join a team, take some tasks full of enthusiasm, and have the life and joy sucked out of them one sprint at a time. Soon enough, they sit in planning meetings, miserably complaining, accusingly asking who wrote that shit. Their transformation to a full team member is complete. They have become one of us. I was once that bright-eyed junior developer....

January 9, 2022 · 2 min · 268 words · Philip Heltweg

Master Thesis: Implementing a Structured Approach to Belief Revision by Deterministic Switching Between Total Preorders

Abstract Belief change research investigates how agents adapt their knowledge with potentially conflicting information. A common formalization is by epistemic states, abstract entities often represented by faithful preorders. Operators describe how epistemic states change with new evidence and are classified by which postulates they satisfy. Different approaches have been suggested for the problem of iterated belief change. Recent work introduces uniform revision that revises an agent’s beliefs based on one static total preorder, therefore lowering representational costs....

November 7, 2021 · 1 min · 175 words · Philip Heltweg

How to kill a dragon

“You’ll never forget your first dragon” used to be the promise of Tibia, a free 2D-MMO I played as a young teenager. I spend day after day playing Tibia, training skills with friends and exploring the world and still… never got to kill a dragon. Coming back With nostalgia rekindled by quickly burning out on WoW: Shadowlands I tried to check in my old account. Sadly, I did not only forget the password but also lost control of my email address....

March 15, 2021 · 4 min · 672 words · Philip Heltweg

Wisdom from the Internet, content that influenced how I think about software (and life).

Finding needles There has never been as much information easily accessible to anyone as right now. The ease of publishing your own writing leads to new problems: The question is no longer where do you find content about a topic but what content is good and worth your time? To help you find the needle in the biggest haystack ever, here is my personal list of good content that influenced me....

December 3, 2020 · 3 min · 611 words · Philip Heltweg

Machine learning basics: Machine Learning by Stanford University (Coursera) review and notes

The popularity of machine learning, data science and related disciplines is exploding and with it the amount of courses, books, block posts etc you are exposed to. I recently finished the relatively old but highly rated course Machine Learning by Stanford University on Coursera and wanted to take the chance to offer my review and notes I took. The course Although the course is old enough to be referred to as “classic” by quite a few descriptions I have read it is timeless in the sense that most good introductions are....

March 14, 2020 · 3 min · 503 words · Philip Heltweg