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I recently finished my studies, so this seems a good time to reflect about how (and why) things worked out. As always I like to share some insights in what I’ve learned in the last 5 years. This is the second part of my series about how to study. You can find the first part about how to write a thesis here Studying is more than about learning new things. It is also about learning how to prioritize your available time and energy to achieve externally set goals....

Writing a thesis is a complex project, that requires planning, self-organization and perseverance. Additionally, when working on a new topic, you will need some time to understand the surroundings of your topic. This post is a collection of my experiences from writing a bachelor and master’s thesis for a computer science degree. Find a topic Finding a topic for your thesis is probably the hardest part. In general there are different approaches to find a topic....

I had the chance to speak at a small conference at my home university about the project (goSDN) I did work on the last 6 months. This is also the project I did write my thesis about, therefore I was pretty confident I had enough inside to answer most of the questions. I thought about speaking at a conference before, but most of the time I felt like I couldn’t provide much insight in topics or my understanding of the technology I use simply wasn’t deep enough....

LaTeX is a software for document preparation. You write your content in plain text .tex files, much like a very basic programming language, and compile it afterwards in the designated format, e.g. pdf. LaTeX is heavily used in academia as it provides an easy way to express mathematical formulae. Besides that most universities provide a template, so you don’t have to think about margins, citation style (and more) and can simply focus on your content....

There are existing services like pingdom or uptimerobot to check if your network services are up and running. But as always I like to be independent of service providers and host as much by myself as possible. So let’s build our own uptime monitoring with Prometheus, Grafana, alertmanager and the Prometheus blackbox-exporter. The general idea is to check if a service is up with the blackbox-exporter. Then scrape this metrics with Prometheus and store it for further usage....