What would you do with €5000 ?

Ok, this question is a little bit different from "What would you do with a million euro's?" The point is I've been nominated for a prize called "de innoveer" (this doesn't really translate, meaning innovation and inno-feather in Dutch).

Our dean Henk Zwetsloot proposed me based on the work done on the software engineering curriculum and the way I keep up with it. There where 12 applications and I'm among the last 3 nominees. On the one hand I'm honoured, on the other hand I feel like I've "just done my job".

The prize is a piece of art and 5000 euro which can be used for ones own development. So I can't help but think about what I would do if I won. Here are some ideas:

* Attending a nice big congres like the QCon last year would be nice.

* A studytrip to the silicon valley or something similar to what the HBO-I did in the past.

* A studytrip to Australia to visit some universities and discuss the possibilities of exchange of lecturers.

* Getting a masters degree in computer science (I have one in math) is always on the back of my mind. But I'm afraid 5000 euro still wouldn't solve problems of sleep, time, family and energy. Maybe later...

Update: it wasn't meant to be, the competition was pretty good. But still, being among the last 3 was pretty cool.

Assembla update

I previously mentioned the site http://www.assembla.com as a free site which offers a complete software development tooling suite (Subversion, Trac, Wiki, ...). The main benefit for us is that the students can form their own projectgroups and administer their own version control. This relieves me and our system administration of a lot of grunt work.

In the mean time the site has gone to a (very reasonable) commercial model but they still support students for free. Recommended!

Was it any good?

A quick note about the events we've been to the last few weeks. Was it any good?

The NITE (Noordelijk IT Event, pronounce 'night') was not yet a great success. There weren't a lot of visitors, creating a bit of an awkward situation. Maybe next time a smaller venue would be better. The first talk was the most interesting for me. Elly de Jong of the police of Groningen talked about their research and development program. He showed some nice projects that I never heard about. Their GPS-based PDA application looked like the project my students do. These projects are happening here in Groningen! That's the effect the people behind NITE wanted to achieve.

The Achmea talk was ok, giving insight in the way such a big firm tries to handle their systems. The location at the top of the Achmea tower in Leeuwarden was especially nice. After sunset we could see the lighttower of Ameland.

Monday we had a guestlecture by Quintor on Continuous Integration. It was very well suited for our students, nice and technical. Maybe a bit heavy on the toolingside (just to give you an impression, the following tools were mentioned: ant, maven, JMX, bamboo, wiki/confluence, jira, clover, blazeds, alfresco, dbunit, hsql, spring, coberture, jcoverage, cactus, ...) but after you master the basics there's always a toolingstep to make.
But for the attentive listener there was also much of interest about agile development and working for regional companies. The students gave it a big thumbs up.

A busy period

There's a busy period coming up for me and 'my' software engineering students.

First we had studentpresentations about Open Source-related subjects. To spice things up we had a number of experts from the NNO (http://www.nn-open.nl/) who asked critical questions and provided feedback. We all learned a lot more about Open Source, what it is and isn't.

This week there's the NITE congress (http://www.nite.nu/node/6) of which I will attend the wednesday. I have yet to find the time to look up what the programme exactly is... :-)

Thursday I'll take 30 students to Achmea for an evening programme on J2EE in the insurance business (http://www.quintor.nl/index.php/quintornieuws/16-okt-java-op-hoog-niveau.html). Quintor is also involved in that.

Later on Quintor (http://www.quintor.nl/) will also be giving a guestlecture at the Hanze about agile development with special focus on Continuous Integration.

And at the end of the quarter I'll be taking all of my students to the JFall (http://www.nljug.org/pages/events/content/jfall_2008/sessions/?template=showprogram.html&fs=1). Thanks in advance for the JFall organisation for making this possible. I'll post my selected programme later.

And between this events I'm also doing some other interesting stuff which I might get around to later.

Keep challenging yourself

A nice way to keep up is to try your hand at one of the countless online competitions. When looking some of these sites up for possible use in the classroom, I was pleased with http://ace.delos.com/usacogate , the trainingsite for the USA Computing Olympiad. Don't be deceived by the somewhat amateuristic look of the site and the abundance of cows. Once registered you can test your skills in algorithm programming on a large number of exercises ranging from easy to very difficult. Your solutions can be submitted and are automatically tested against a number of testcases. If you get it right the first time you get a nice compliment, but that only happened to me once :-)

Another link a got mentioned by Jos Bredek is http://www.hackquest.com. This site's layout also doesn't impress but the content seems ok. There you can take on 100 puzzles of 'hacking' yourself into webpages with unsecure Java applets, Javascript, etc. Jos has solved 30+ by now, a student already has 97!

The math-debate revisited

While on my bike to the Hanze after the summerbreak I was contemplating the math-debate that keeps going on in dutch education.

As you probably know the concept of "competency" has been leading in the HBO. We define a competency to be a combination of knowledge, skill and professional attitude.
In making the education "competency focussed" a lot of math that could not directly be linked to competencies was removed from the curricula. (This also solved the problems of too many students failing for these subjects. Of course the level of input from HAVO is a factor here, too.)

When it became clear that too much math had been removed the debate was on how we could align math with competencies. Most of the time the focus was on the knowledge-aspect of math and competencies.

The thought that struck me was that maybe we should be looking at the skill-part of the competencies. Why not look at math as training for skills like modeling, abstract reasoning and problem solving. An analogy (always risky): a basketballplayer lifts a lot of weights without complaining that he doesn't need to do that in the match. And the brain is our muscle.

I'll leave it at this and won't attempt to get chess into the curriculum. ;-) But maybe we could take a fresh look at the HBO-competencies with this in mind. There are some points where the level of abstract reasoning could be more specified (A3 - Scientific Application, A6 - Working problem directed)

The manycore shift

"The manycore shift is coming!" my colleague Jos Bredek keeps telling (harassing?) me about every other day. "What are you going to do about it?"

Even if you take into account that the journals and bloggers are hyping each other up, it is an important development which is coming nearer everyday. The fact that multi/manycore systems are becoming prominent cries for programmers who have the skills to take advantage of them. And these programmers need to have programming languages and tools to work with.

What does a bachelor student need to know about parallel programming? How would we teach them this subject? I don't have definite answers yet, but it's got my attention.

So in the past weeks I've seen some interesting material passing by. I'll share the best with you:

* The manycore shift, a general white paper by microsoft.

* Microsofts parallel extensions are something a developer can sink his teeth in. This blog post by Daniel Moth shows the concrete usage in .Net. Daniel Moth? Yes, he's the guy from the QCon ("I speak so fast, just download the video and play it at half speed.")

* So what's the Java world up to then? Under JSR166 mr Doug Lea is working on a parallel "fork-join" framework which might be included in Java 7. Some interesting links: an InfoQ article, a in-depth pdf and the homepage including the API.

My first impression is that .Nets Parallel.for(...) and Parallel.do(...) are really simple and concise compared to the Java stuff? I could teach that in about 5 minutes. But then again, I might not yet know enough about this material to make a real comparison...