Training

At this year’s EuroClojure I gave a talk about probabilistic programming with Clojure, using the Anglican probabilistic programming system. Abstract: Probabilistic Programming Systems aim to merge general purpose programming with probabilistic modelling. They provide powerful statistical inference and thus allow developers to focus on the modelling with tools and environments they are comfortable with. These emerging methods are promising additions to the Data Scientist’s toolbox and an interesting, satisfying playground for programming enthusiasts. This talk is an introduction to Probabilistic Programming Systems, their use and value for the industry and Clojure’s great library “Anglican”. ...

A few weeks ago Christoph and I gave an introduction to MicroServices at Futurice’s Beer&Tech sessions in Berlin. The idea was to collect our impressions from the DevOps conference 2015 in Berlin. I think we covered a lot of ground here from business value to technology and some simple live examples. The tools we introduced to were Docker, Consul and Prometheus and how to glue them together easily. As part of giving this talk, I developed a small playground with the mentioned technologies. I already blogged briefly about this project called “MS-KOS”. The live coding examples can be found on Github: MS-KOS ...

Recently I had the chance to be a coach at ClojureBridge Berlin. You might not have heard about this event before, but maybe you know RailsBridge. ClojureBridge’s mission is: ClojureBridge aims to increase diversity within the Clojure community by offering free, beginner-friendly Clojure programming workshops for women. Of course I did not hesitate to volunteer for that. I have to admit though, that I also had a hidden agenda: I wanted to test the hypothesis, that a LISP (Clojure in this case) is well suited to get started with programming. When talking to experienced developers about Clojure, I often have to face a negative reaction towards LISPs, sometimes also about (mostly) pure Functional Programming (less these days, as FP is so hip again). When I told some colleagues, including some with a formal computer science education as well as way more experienced devs that me, that I am going to help programming beginners to get started by using Clojure, they most often asked back if this is some kind of sadistic prank. ...

A while ago I did a small introduction to building a simple REST API with Clojure from scratch at Futurice in Berlin. While preparing that, I did create a small tutorial and demo project to follow along ( GitHub, Tutorial). The presentation was recorded on video and you can check it out right now, right here: [embed]https://vimeo.com/125578412[/embed] Feedback, as well as pull requests are highly appreciated. The tutorial is not complete yet and has some glitches here and there I guess. However, I already got feedback, that I was a good starting point for multiple people without previous Clojure experience. Thanks Nils ...

In my last post I told myself “not to overdo” it. Sadly exactly this happened. I have lots of trouble with shin splints (medial). :( What happened? The last long run, which went well was on 19th August. Previously I was running over 30km multiple times on the weekend. Obviously this was too much. I ended up with painful shin splints in both legs. Normally these are a result of overstress. ...

About two month ago I did sign up for my first marathon and started to focus my training for that event. In my previous post I defined a simple way to measure my progress towards the goal, running the marathon distance. Another month has passed and here is my updated report. It was not a great month for training, as we did move to Berlin and a had a bad cold for almost 2 weeks. Both things did collide with my training schedule. But let’s have a closer look at the state of affairs: ...

Roughly one month ago I did sign up for my first marathon. At that time I also wrote a post about how I will prepare for that. So let’s have fun and create some additional pressure by publishing the results so far. How to measure progress The main goal is to be able to run the marathon distance. That’s why maximum run distance is of major importance. Secondly I want to finish in under 4 hours. This means a pace of under 5.7 min/km (btw. I really dislike using this unit, but it’s just so common for running). So I am having an eye on the average pace of the longest run. ...

Running a marathon has been on my list for quite a while now. The past 1.5 years I did focus on learning Sambo (russian martial arts). But I just did sign up for the Frankfurt Marathon in October. What are the goals? The primary goal is to finish. In general this probably should be the only goal for a first marathon. However since I did very well in over fulfilling my self set goals recently, I will aim at a finish time below 4h. ...