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[mcs1408]

2016 in review

2016 was a big year for me. A lot changed, most for the better. At the beginning of the year I wrote a review for 2015 to reflect upon what I did during that time and what happened to me. As I very much liked doing so, I chose to do the same again for the year that just went by. It took me quite some time to finalize it, but here it is.

Diplom Informatiker

The start of 2016 had “change” written all over it already, I had just handed in my Diploma Thesis and was already on the hunt for a job I could work at. By the end of January I had defended my Thesis and claimed the right to be called “Diplom Informatiker Max Schultze”. This was a huge turning point in my live. So far everything I did had a straightup goal. I went to school to reach the Abitur, to be able to study. At the point I did so, it was clear that I wanted to study computer science. I did so to reach the mentioned title to be able to conquer the world. But how exactly would that look like?

Zalando

As it turned out reaching the starting point for this ambitious goal was way easier than I expected. After a successful application process I started my next big journey working at Zalando. Big Data was the name of the game and I was lucky to join one of the coolest teams in the company from both an interpersonal, but also topical perspective. So far we made huge progress in our project, I went to my first ever conference and over all I just learned A LOT. I dug deep into new programming languages and open source big data systems and I got to know development processes and methodologies. So far I can say that I am super happy how things went for me and that I am really looking forward to entering my second year at this cool and innovative company.

Raising the Standards

One of the cool things that comes with working full time is a nice little pay check at the end of every month that all of a sudden allows you to buy all the things you ever wanted. While we started with such normal things as buying a new bed, a new fridge and fixing the damn shower, the middle of the year finally brought a new gaming gear for me including a nice big second monitor and several small things that just make things easier. Besides the big new things I very much noticed that we spend more money on better food and it is a pleasure to have the luxury to buy that small thing in the store that looks super cool and that you really want RIGHT NOW. A couple month ago after the initial “shut up and take my money” phase I finally started saving some money, as we are currently seriously planning to get a new flat within the next couple month.

Magic

One of the cool things I now again had the resources for, was participating in bigger international Magic tournaments. During the year I have been to Prague, Stockholm, London, Warsaw and Madrid. Although I haven't had a huge breakthrough tournament performance yet, I have performed much better than average and am really happy with my play during the year. On the regional level I won my first smaller tournament that qualified me for another second level qualification tournament and I won another 50 people tournament - even in a form of the game I have never before played at competitive level. The one thing that probably was most important to get me to that point again was my enhanced cooperation with my buddy Jamin, a young Berlin player with a huge talent for the game. By now we meet almost weekly to discuss the current state of the game and practice and prepare for the tournaments we are about to enter.

More Games

In July 2016 an innocent little mobile game was brought to the world and hell broke loose. It caught me, it caught my friends and with us millions of others within only a couple of days: Pokemon Go. The hype was real and everybody was super excited to get out and play. By now the initial hype is gone and what is left is a game that more and more makes developments for the better. I always used to be one of those players that sticks to a game much longer than others, but this is the first time that a game kind of warped not only my time schedule around it, but also how I spent my free time. Since I started playing the game I walked almost 1000km hunting pokemon all over europe and by now I am proud to say that I am only missing one more generation I pokemon that is available in europe. As the last 2 month showed that the game is very much taking progress into a good direction I am rather sure I will stick around even longer. Gotta catch ’em all.

After my new computer arrived I entered another game that is made to grind for endless hours, which I had been spectating for over a year already at that point: League of Legends. While my old laptop was just not able to run it stably, I had no more excuses to not join in any more. I have not spend as many endless hours on this, as I have walking around outside catching pokemon, but I am still very much enjoying the game and learning a lot whenever I enter the Summoner’s Rift.

Less Poker

Came work, came less time for endless hours of grinding. Especially in the first 2-3 month of working at Zalando I struggled a lot of fitting all the things I wanted to do in my free time into the now reduced time that I actually had for doing so. The first thing I did not have enough concentration left over to continuously devote time to, was poker. Unfortunately poker is an unforgiving game for those that only play once in awhile. While I still enjoy the game and still love to join in for a live poker round with a couple friends every now and then, I soon had to realize, that my performance got worse and worse without continuous practice, up to the point where I pretty much quit online poker and cashed out my bankroll. It was an amazing journey that brought me from an initial investment of $20 up to more than 1000€, actually the money I used to buy my new computer from. While there have been a couple new hobbies and a couple old ones I returned to, this was one of those that sadly had to go.

Personal Development

The first half of 2016 was all about learning. I learned to give important talks and I learned a lot about presenting myself, be it my thesis defense or job interviews, but the most I learned was after my start at Zalando. There has been rarely a time I read so much as in the first 2 month of my new job. Additionally I had a lot of interesting presentations and was talking A LOT to my colleagues who were very willing to show me ALL the things. But even after this initial period I did not fall into a boring 9 to 5 routine, as I am lucky enough to work in a field that brings new challenges every day, that require new solutions being thought out, new technologies being touched and new people being talked to. Since I started, I never stopped learning and I like it a lot.

After some time went by and I got more used to the challenges my daily work brings, I got some more breathing room and I started thinking about things way deeper than technical tasks and how to solve them. Thoughts about mid and long term perspectives came up: where do I see myself in a year or two or five, what are my goals for the future, where do I want to be. Additionally, I put a lot of thoughts into inter personal relationships and communication, as well as intrinsic motivation and social skills overall. As part of this process I did my first personality test which - in combination with having a great colleague of mine to talk to and evaluate the whole thing with in detail - gave me a lot of insights about my own strengths and weaknesses. Also due to his recommendations I read “Emotional Intelligence” by Daniel Goleman. I can absolutely recommend this book, as it on the one hand is very exact and scientific throughout the whole spectrum starting at how emotions function on a biological level, over emotional learning, up to human interactions. On the other hand it gives a very well written introduction into every part of the topic using fitting examples and proper use cases for every aspect. I have to admit that it still is not an easy read, as the topic in general is quite heavy, yet I can still recommend it to whomever is interested in this topic. In general this topic is huge and I don't think more of it would fit into this review, but I might run another post on it on another day. To summarize, this topic - again - taught me a lot about myself and areas that I can still improve in. And improvement is what I seek.

Old and New Resolutions

There have been several things that I set out to do in 2016. First and foremost I wanted to care more for my friends. There have been many friends I made over the years and sadly I realized that when moving forward it is quite easy to lose contact to some of them. I have never been one of those who regularly called people to keep contact and as a lot of us are like me, it is easy to slip out of sight. Especially when you get new jobs, new hobbies and also new friends that you spend time with. At one point I realized that the best way to keep contact is, well, keep contact! It is not that hard to at least send out christmas wishes, or shoot a quick facebook message every now and then. And guess what, it is absolutely worth it. Although I just recently started constantly doing so, I very much will conquer my weaker self that kept me from doing so in the past.

One thing I did not progress a lot in is doing sports. That is where my inner devil is still in full control of me right now. At least I did not gain any significant additional weight during the last year, which might very well come from better eating habits and better food, but I am still lacking proper physical exercising, which I have to change during the next year. By now I put a fixed appointment into my calendar that forces me to go to the gym every monday after work. Lets hope I can keep that up over time.

The last thing I want to mention might very much be the most important one. 2016 was the second full year that I was allowed to spent with Anna at my side. We had uncountable amazing hours together and I am after all that time still baffled how well we fit together. I am really looking forward to the next year with her, which will bring exciting new challenges, like finding a new bigger flat for the two of us. I really want to thank Anna for sticking with me for so long and supporting me in good times, but also when things are not running all that smoothly.

There are several topics that I could continue writing about in much more detail, but those probably deserve their own posts as this one has already grown quite out of hand. For now I will call it a day, or better a year regarding review. 2016 has been a nice one to me. May 2017 be even more exciting.

[mcs1408]

Who am I?

Recently I have been thinking about the purpose of this blog. So far it has been a general valve for everything I deemed worth telling the outside world. It started with the intention of writing about my personal poker project in addition to giving an overview about all the topics I care about. During the last months I realized though, that I do not very often find the time anymore to write down everything that happens in my life, and as unfortunately I am no longer very much involved into online poker du to time reasons, the initial intend is gone, too.

I do not plan on closing this blog anytime soon, but I will try out a little different approach. For the future I will continue writing this blog on a less frequent basis (as it already happens), but also throw in more theoratical topics like how I see myself as a person, things that I am currently thinking about a lot, or stuff that changed. Probably I will still end up with a quick capture of what happened since the last update.

Triggering all this have been general thoughts that I had in the last days and weeks about who I am as a person, the things that drive me, and the direction I want to go. That is what I want to start with today. Usually when somebody used to ask me (and that recently happened), who I am as a person, I answered with a flurry of things that I did in the past, that I am currenlty doing and that I am interested in. I have talked about all that already on this blog, but what actually lies behind that? I want to dig deeper into what is my mindset and how do I tackle certain challenges, or even every day situations.

I am driven by challenge

Whenever I start a project, be it for work or as a hobby, I strive to be an expert in that field. I rarely quit something just because it is hard to master, but instead try even harder to get there. I search for competition. I surround myself with people better than me to learn from their experience and personally grow with bigger challenges. I set myself very high goals and work hard to achieve them. This behaviour I have observed several times in my past already. Be it Magic, Poker, or my current work. I never stopped improving until people started recognizing me for what I was doing. Even the smallest browser game I touched, I used to play for way longer than others to figure out the last edges I could get. If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing it right.

I am vocal

I often have an opinion on a lot of topics and I tend to communicate that. I am always up for a well-founded discussion. Whenever you ask me about a topic I am eager to share my opinion, but also to be inspired by the thoughts of others. I am a huge fan of clear communication to solve common challenges, but also to clarify expectations on each other.

I focus on what is important

People spend a lot of time not talking about problems they have with each other and thus make things worse over time. I am not one of those. I talk about problems I have and try to solve them. Especially when somebody fucks up something it is not worth it blaming them for what they did. It is way more important to fix the situation and make sure something similar does not happen again. I got this attitude mainly from my poker experiences as I learned to control emotions in situations where they only cloud your judgement for the worse. If I have an argument I want it to be on a logical basis and not because of emotions.

I am a networker

As already discussed I am driven by challenge and always want to improve on what I do. Additionally I am very vocal about what I do, which leads to me discussing with a lot of people and naturally leads to lots of new contacts wherever I go. Whenever I find somebody that is very interesting to talk to, I try to keep contact. On top of that I have a good portion of social competence which in combination with my attitude towards fact-driven discussions makes me a good fit for groups of similar thinking people.

I am a thinker

Not everything I talk about comes from spontanious ideas (although it might sometimes seem like it, as I am a huge fan of smack talk and dump word plays in appropriate groups of people), but most of it comes from me thinking intensely about certain topics. The social I am, the same I need time to withdraw myself from everything and just let my thoughts fly, sort them through and tinker out new solutions. Especially when it comes to challenging tasks regarding strategic descisions, I highly enjoy going over the different options and creating a detailed plan on how to solve the issue.

I like to have fun

Not everything is always about challenges, improvement, great plans, and future grows. Sometimes you just want to hang out and have a nice time without thinking to hard about anything. Although even in my free time I search for challenges in different competetive games, I sometimes just want to meet friends and do nothing productive then enjoying myself and talk bullshit.

For a first approach I think this sums up pretty good who the person behind all the hobbies, facts and ideas is. For the future I might even dive deeper into specific areas, or start talking about specific situations again that made me thinking a lot. Who knows. Until then I leave you with your own thoughts on how you might see me in your eyes or even how you reflect all this on yourself.

[mcs1408]

Once more with Magic

It’s been quite some time since I last wrote about my formerly biggest hobby Magic: the Gathering. Today I finally want to do so again as something quite report worthy happened: I won my first tournament! That sounds strange you might think, as how can I just have won my first tournament, if I already played hundreds of them and even made a couple thousand dollars out of those. Well, it's not exactly the first tournament I won, but the first that actually matters.

There are several levels of Magic tournaments. The first level is playing casual Magic at the kitchen table with your friends. That’s what I started about 13 years ago and I have always been quite good at. The second level is small regular tournaments at your local game store. This includes the weekly draft you attend or even the official Friday Night Magic tournaments. And here is where we leave casual Magic and come into competitive areas.

Let me explain competitive Magic the other way around and start with the most important tournament: the World Championship. This is where the elite of the game meets once a year and the dream of every player that wants to put his or her mark on the game. The best 24 players battle for the title of the World Champion and for a huge prize pool. The second most important tournament and almost the only chance to actually reach the Worlds is the ProTour. The ProTour happens four times each year with around 400 participants that all previously earned an invitation to this prestigious tournament. This tournament also divides the year into four seasons that each relate to one of the four Magic sets coming out every year. There are several ways to earn an invitation to the ProTour. One is reaching the Top8 of a Grand Prix. Grand Prix are tournaments open for everybody happening around 50 times a year in different cities all over the world. They usually have between 1000-2000 participants which makes it not all that easy to reach the final eight.

Another way to qualify are the so called ProTour Qualifiers or PTQs. In the past those have been free to attend events, about 150 each season that each give an invite to the one person winning the whole thing. As interest in those events grew a lot and had reached the point where PTQs had an average of 100-200 players, the structure recently changed into a two level system. The first level are so called preliminary-PTQs (or PPTQs) which can be offered once per season by every qualified local store. The winner of each of those events (who usually have 20-50 participants) qualifies for the second level: the Regional PTQs (or RPTQs). RPTQs are again offered at different locations all over the world, but only about 35 of them each season. Each person that won a PPTQ for that season is allowed to participate in exactly one RPTQ. They usually have 80-100 players and give a direct invite to the ProTour to the best four players of the tournament.

To come back to the story, I once managed to Top8 a Grand Prix which qualified me for the only ProTour I have ever played. I lost immediately in the quarterfinals of that event. I never won a PTQ that earned a direct invite to the PT. In oh so many tries I never won a PPTQ. Until now. Last weekend me and my testing buddy Jamin went to Magdeburg to play in two PPTQs that were held in the two stores of the city, one on Saturday, one on Sunday. The Saturday event hat 26 participants and thus we played 5 rounds of Swiss, followed by a Top8 played out in Single Elimination. During the Swiss rounds I lost exactly ones, but still managed to make the Top8 in 4th position. In the Semifinals I had to beat Jamin, who had not lost a match yet. The finals were pretty tough, as I actually had to play against the one person who had beaten me so far. But I managed to get my revenge and after all those years finally took down my first competitive event. I know it does not sound all that impressive to win a 26 player tournament, but in about 30 PPTQs I have played so far I have reached the Top8 in about every other event and reached the finals in about a third of the Top8s I made. Still I was never able to close out the whole thing. That is why it means a lot to me not only to finally drag my statistics towards the right direction, but also to be able to play for a direct slot to the ProTour again.

To round out an amazing weekend my buddy Jamin went completely undefeated on Sunday and took down the second event we went for (with this time 34 competitors). He only lost a single match the whole weekend and that was against me. Two guys came from Berlin to Magdeburg and took down both offered events. Good quota I guess.

[mcs1408]

How agility fixed our project

It’s been two month now since I started working at Zalando. Although I already grew into my team and got used to some processes, everything still feels new and exciting. Every day new challenges arise and each successful step leads to a bigger, even more impactful follow up. Today I want to talk about a specific problem we encountered that changed the focus of our whole project. But let me go back a little to describe our current situation.

I was ending my onboarding process the week before easter and was given a research task that I worked on for the next two weeks. Our team is working in two focus groups that both work in the same big project, but in different areas of it. At the point I started my research task it was already decided which of the two groups I was about to join after completion. Both of the focus groups use Scrum - an agile working method to structure their work - which basically means every two weeks all team members sit down together for several meetings to review what they achieved in the last two weeks, and plan exactly what they want to accomplish within the next two weeks.

Wednesday is the usual Scrum planning day that alternates between the two groups. My research task was done the friday after easter, so I gave a team präsentation on the following monday and started planning the join with my focus group for the next Sprint (that’s how one two-week-cycle is called). I had already participated in lots of team meetings of both focus groups the weeks before and I was already familiar with most of the used technologies, as well as the current problems that my colleagues were working on. But this would be the first time I would take over responsibility for tasks directly contributing to the team’s progress. By wednesday we already had a plan in which direction to got, but during the meetings everything turned out to go into a direction nobody expected.

During the last weeks my colleagues were working on the evaluation of a technology that was recommended for our specific use case. So far they had been working on gathering insights, setting up a cluster environment and they already managed to do some first performance tests and fixed early difficulties. So far the plan was to finish performance testing of the system by the midth of april and everything was done to work towards that goal. Came said wednesday, came the review meeting for the two weeks before. Some performance test results were presented, but nobody was really able to interpret the results and I got the feeling that something could be going wrong.

After the review meeting, which is just a half an hour presentation that is also open to people outside the team to show the results of the last two weeks, we have another meeting called retrospective. This is a structured team internal look into what was going on during the last two weeks: what was good, what went wrong and what were processes that could be improved. Herein we picked up the general discussion about the purpose of the current project’s path. We realized that at that point nobody felt really comfortable with the system and we uncovered that currently our main reason to use the system was that it was recommended to us. The overall goal of the whole performance testing was, that in the near future we would be able to give an answer to the simple question: “Does the system fit our needs or do we have to search for another solution?”. Based on the current situation nobody felt comfortable to even estimate how long it would take to come to an answer on that. We realized that it made no sense to continue random tests whose results we were not able to interpret and that we had to spent more time upfront getting deeper insights on the system. The goal of doing enough testing to evaluate the system by the midth of april was not achievable.

After lunch we normally have our planning meeting for the next sprint, but instead of getting a ToDo list ready for the next two weeks we first had to discuss how we wanted to proceed in general. We spent the whole meeting getting important discussions about the architectural future of the project going and we had to conclude that currently we were not able to start the next sprint. We only managed to get three big steps that we wanted to tackle: 1. Get familiar with the system. 2. Plan and perform benchmark testing on the system 3. Make an informed decision if the system suites our needs.

At that point I jumped in and proposed a plan how to further proceed. As none of the three big steps could be time estimated without a high level of uncertainty, we had to break them down into smaller tasks. The team gathered again in the afternoon to look into the systems documentation to see what were specific areas that we would like to do research on. After knowing what were the topics we would like to investigate, we more easily would be able to tell how much time in total it would take to do so.

Additionally we had another meeting with our Security Architect in the afternoon that spawned another clarifying discussion about the security requirements of such a system, as well as its technical implications. After the dust settled I sat down and created Tasks for each of the research topics that we agreed on. We decided to sit down the next morning again to review those tasks that i created and afterwards start a new attempt for our actual Sprint planning meeting. And so we did. We made some minor adjustments within the tasks, but we were finally able to agree on the work we wanted to do in the next two weeks. We knew what the direction was that we wanted to go now. We also knew the steps we had to take to get there. We fixed the purpose of our project. And our agile working method helped us to do so.

[mcs1408]

The poker challenge

My main reason to start this blog was a poker bankroll challenge. Yet the times I have spent talking poker have become more rare than anything else. The last time I have been mentioning the topic at all was during my “year in review” blog post at the beginning of January. It does not mean that I have not played poker since. I even think it was the most important time frame for my poker play ever, but there were a lot more important thinks going on during that time that needed to be reported first. Today I want to wrap up what happened since then and where I stand right now.

To fill the gap I have to go all the way back to the days before Christmas - the start of the holidays. Any poker player will tell you that the Christmas holidays are probably the most valuable time in the year, as a lot of recreational players spend their time and money to try to compete at stakes they really should not. Yet they do and as such the regulars feel like being in magical Christmas land. The days before Christmas for the first time I reached my personal bankroll goal of $1000 to move up from playing $10 buy-in tables to $25 buy-in tables. The first attempts at the new limit looked quite promising, but fate turned quickly and I ran quite poorly with a combination of not wholeheartedly playing over the actual Christmas days while visiting my family. The moment I came back home I had to face a decision that was never necessary beforehand: I had to move down a limit. Back on the NL10 grind the holiday bonus kicked in though, and it did not even take me 2 full days to be back on NL25 again. From there it felt like flying, as on my second attempt to get a grasp on the new limit I made about $400 within a single week of play. While everything was working out perfectly I started adding more and more tables again until I was back at my former full capacity of playing ten tables at the time.

Ones the holidays were over things started slowing down. I made no more huge winnings and even experienced some loosing sessions again. I knew I was again not running all that hot during that time, yet slowly but surely the thought crept in, that my lucky run was actually the anomaly and that slowly bleeding away money was the norm. From time to time I started switching back and forth between NL10 and NL25, but at one point all my holiday winnings were gone again and I knew something had to change.

I sat down to analyse my game with several friends who are or have been successful at poker for quite some time. During one of those sessions my mentor was even impressed with my precise analysis of certain situations and I realized I had what it takes to break the new limit, but was just not able to apply it all the time. At that point I came to the conclusion that was so plain obvious that it is almost painful to talk about: I reduced the number of tables I was playing.

As everything went so well during holidays I never again questioned that playing ten tables at the time would be wrong. Especially during the time switching back and forth from NL10 to NL25 I put no thought on this, as ten-tabling on NL10 was working out fine, so why shouldn't it on NL25? Let me get that clear, play is WAY different on the new limit and it takes a lot of mental capacity to fully focus on all the details you need to think about to be successful.

I went back down from ten tables at the time to six. That was the turning point for my play on NL25. All of a sudden I started having winning sessions again. The graph went up and that continued for the next couple of sessions until another poker-wise-obstacle kicked in: Having a full time job.

While I somewhat expected that, I still did not take it for real until I made my first experiences. Working 40 hours a week does not only take away a big chunk of time every day, but also a lot of your mental capacity. Ones you come home at 7pm you technically have five more hours to grind the tables and get things going. But there are just days when you come home and you are not able to continue any straight thought. In addition all your social activities that beforehand could be distributed over the whole day have to take place in those evening hours and take away additional time.

The worst thing at that? If you do not play frequently enough regression kicks in. It does not take much time until you start playing worse because you are just out of practice. You are lacking confidence and repetition and this slowly starts eating into your bankroll again. Two weeks ago I came to the conclusion to stop playing for now until I work out a plan how to continue. I m not entirely giving up here, as we still have real live sessions every 1 or 2 weeks. From time to time I even play some NL10, as I feel confidant enough to beat that limit even without a lot of practice. Still I have to make a plan how to continue and so far I have not sat down to do so. I am currently still trying to figure out the whole new work-life balance, but ones I get a more clear vision about that, I will also update my poker expectations.

[mcs1408]

My work at zalando

It's been a while since I wrote my last blogpost and a lot has happened since then. Most of it has to do with me joining zalando as a (big) data engineer about two weeks ago! But let me pick off my storyline were I left at the end of my last post.

After I had my interview as well as a trial day within the team that I actually would start working at, I already had a pretty deep look into this specific part of data engineering at zalando. Even after having the second job interview at the consulting company I was rather sure that I'd prefer this job position to the general consulting position that I also applied for.

Two days after the second job interview I got an email with a job offer from that company. It felt good to know that they were interested in my skillset. Having gotten that offer though, I did not know how to react while I was still waiting for a second answer. During the day I wrote my HR contact at zalando and told him that by now I had an offer from a different company. My intention was to ask for a general thumps up/down such that I would know how to react towards the other offering.

Half an hour later my cellphone rang. My recruiter that was also part of the initial interview called me with a complete and fully worked out offer. Not only was I really happy about getting to work in the position I actually wanted, but the offer was even way better than the one I got from the consulting company. Still I took my time, thought everything through and waited till monday until I officially accepted the zalando offer and declined the other one. My starting date would be two weeks later - 15th February.

Within the next two weeks I did not do all that much. A familiy birthday, meeting with some friends, sorting through old documents, but mainly calm down before the figurative storm (ok, more of spark or flink fwiw).

My first day at zalando was quite exciting. We were invited to a Welcome Day at a different location than the one I would actually work at and by “we” I mean me and the other 44 newbies that were starting at the middle of the month. We have been told they have an event like this twice a month and we were a small group. During that day we learned a lot about the young history of the company, the culture and the general future direction. Additionally we had some time to already get to know some of the other newbies.

The following four weeks were described as onboarding process. During that time we would get lots of presentations about all the different parts of zalando as well as different key technologies that are used quite often. While doing so we would either work on a smaller project to toy around a bit with all the new tools and architectures, or already start working in the teams we would eventually start at, to get to know the tools and people that we would actually be working with. The second day was the first one at the location I would be working on and while the Welcome Day was for all the newbies from all departments of all the different locations, the number settled down to 14 that would actually start working at this location. I for myself chose to immidiately start my learning process within my actual team.

Since than everything has been overwhelming. There is so much to learn about and while I try to somewhat organize my learning process about all the tools and all the different systems used, it all still is very chaotic. I slowly start to understand the concepts behind everthing and start toying around locally with single parts of the whole, but it for sure will take weeks until I will actually do something useful for the team.

For my part I love the learning process. While I have not read that much in a very long time and also it has been a while since I ended so many days in a row with a headache, it is still a lot of fun and I am really looking forward to the next weeks until I finally will be able to contribute towards the teams actual work.

[mcs1408]

A big summary

A lot has happened during the last weeks since I have posted my 2015 in review entry. To shortly summarize, I have had a telephone interview, two job interviews and a trial day. I defended my diploma thesis and I have been to Scotland over the last weekend to participate in a Burns Supper organized by friends of my family. But let me go over all of these occasions one at a time.

Occupation

After the holidays were over, I got contacted by the first companies that I applied to. The first interview I had was a short telephone pre-screening at Monday, 11th January with a consulting company. It went quite well and I was told I will be invited soon for an on site job interview. The first on site job interview was planned for Thursday, 14th at a huge online sales company that also do a lot of research on data science. Unfortunately it got canceled the same morning as one of the interviewers got ill. It was rescheduled for the 20th, which perfectly fit into the most stressful week I had so far this year. The 21st was already scheduled for my thesis defense and from 22nd-25th I would be in Scotland for the already mentioned Burns Supper. The interview took about two hours and was partially an HR interview talking about my history, soft skills and general envisioning of a future work space. The second part was the more techy part were I got asked some basic data base and data analytic questions in addition to getting to know the companies intern structure and working areas from a technical point of view. Overall this interview went quiet well, too, and the day after I got invited to a trial day inside the company! The fun part... it was scheduled for Tuesday, 26th, the day after I came back from Scotland. And oh, as that wasn’t enough, on Wednesday afternoon I received the invitation from the consulting company for their on site job interview for Wednesday, 27th.

Diplom Informatiker

The second big pillar during the last weeks was the final part of my studies. I got contacted with the evaluation of my diploma thesis early in January with the suggested date for the defense. After handling all the organisational parts I started to work on the actual talk a couple days before the scheduled date. Obviously it took until the evening before the defense to actual finish the preparation and it for sure would have been way better to finish earlier, as I was already very nervous the whole day before because of my first real job interview. The nervousness did not really go down at all as I was approaching the defense, but it was all for nothing. The talk went really well and the round of questions afterwards had nothing of an examination, but was way more an interesting open discussion on the thesis and the general topic. At the point I went out a huge load fell off. I felt really relieved and I had a full day to just calm down and relax before starting the next part of the week.

Burns Supper

For those of you who don’t know, Robert Burns was one of the most important and most famous Scottish poets. Every year around his Birthday at 25th January a Burns Supper is celebrated by people interested in Scottish history all over the world. During the last ten years my father used to organize a big Burns Supper in Berlin with a lot of friends from Scotland coming over every year to celebrate together. This year though we chose to swap it around and actually we received the invitation from our Scottish friends to come over to a Burns Supper organized by them. On Friday Anna and I were flying over to Glasgow, while my sister and her boyfriend flew the day before and my parents already went over on Wednesday. We got picked up at the airport and went all the way to a bunk house near Inversnaid pretty much in the middle of nowhere near Loch Lomond. During the next days we had several beautiful walks in the nearby hills and lovely evenings with lots of drinks and Scottish folk music. Especially the Burns Supper itself on Saturday evening was an amazing experience. Fortunately my parents gave me the awesome message, that I will be able to return to my beloved Scotland soon. As a present for finishing my studies they will pay a journey back to this beautiful country for me and Anna within the next couple month.

Back to work

Back to work I literally went, as the day after coming back to Germany I had my trial day. It was really interesting to directly work inside of a team all working on Big Data specialized topics. My tasks for the day were setting up a Big Data System of my choice between Apache Flink, Spark and Hadoop and - who would have guessed - I chose the first one. I gained a lot from working in a whole setup guide for the system into my diploma thesis and around the lunch break I was able to switch over to the other tasks that were mainly implementations for certain applications. At the end of the day I sat down with the three people supervising my whole day. I hope I was able to leave a positive impression on them, as I really liked the whole environment, as well as the tasks I was working on.

Without a break the next day brought the next job interview. Unfortunately I was not able to gain as deep of an inside at this company as the first one, as I was only able to talk to the interviewers for about an hour in addition to the 30 minute telephone interview I already had. In general though they also left the impression on me that they offer a very welcoming and supportive environment, while working on lots of interesting projects. Additionally they left the impression that they were really interested in my skill set and that they would contact me again soon to hopefully offer me an employment at their company, too.

Overall, it has been very interesting weeks and I am really looking forward to the opportunities that will arise in the next days and weeks. I have no clue yet, where I will end up working and when I will start doing so, but I will probably know soon!

[mcs1408]

A year in review

Thanks to a friend of mine who wrote a review of his last year on his Facebook page I decided that this is a good idea for myself, too. It is a good way to recap everything that happened over an important period of time and to summarize where I stand now and what my plans are for the next year. 2015 has been a really important year for me. While 2014 was really hard for me as I was rebuilding from a nervous break down, 2015 was all about building up on that base and regaining momentum to work on my future plans.

Diplmoa Thesis

At the beginning of the year I started to work on my Diploma Thesis “Executing AsterixDB Query Language on Apache Flink” which was all about comparing two Big Data systems to each other while writing a compiler to execute the one’s queries on the other. Unfortunately during the first two to three month I took the whole thesis not serious enough. After the initially planned six month I had to extend the thesis for another three month which fortunately is an option everybody can take during his thesis if justified. As it was not only my failed planning, but also some serious problems I had with the two systems, this was not a problem at all. After nine month I was still not fully able to compare the two systems to each other as one of them had serious stability issues. I was able to write a working compilation unit though, as well as a thesis that I am proud of. At the beginning of 2016 I will have to defend my thesis in front of the referee committee which will also be publicly attainable. This will mark the end of an area I have been working on for the past seven years. My studies will finally come to an end.

Finances

2015 was the year to overcome financial difficulties. As my scholarship ended at the end of 2014 I had no more “free money” which might have been the driving factor to take my studies to an end. Wisely I saved up some money during the time I received the scholarship which I decided to partly access. Additionally I increased the time at my working student job at SAP to twice a week instead of once as I used to do before. In addition to less available monthly money, another big factor came in at the beginning of the year. My girlfriend Anna came over from Dresden to Berlin and moved into my flat. As at that point she did not have any steady source of income I had to pay for two for a while. Came summer we finally managed to find a  side job for her, too, and most of our financial difficulties were solved.

SAP

By the end of September it was time to end my job as a working student at SAP. My contract was running out and I chose not to extend it again as I had only to more month left for my thesis and I wanted to fully focus on it to make sure I do not fail. I had been at SAP Berlin for six years and I have to say it was an amazing time. I got to know a lot of awesome colleagues, I have worked at several interesting projects and I have learned a lot about working in a big IT company. I am very sure all this will help me with my future work wherever I will end up. Although at first it was kind of hard to not have that weekly routine, I was able to put the additional time to good use to finish the thesis. The job still payed for my expenses till the end of October and since then I am living of the rest of my savings. Approximately this will be enough until the end of January if not February, so I have enough time to find a job that will take me from there.

Anna

Another amazing thing that happened at the beginning of the year I have already mentioned. Anna moved in. During the whole year she has been such an enrichment to my life. After I had lived alone in my flat for about six years this was the most welcome change I have experienced during that time and I have yet to regret to decision. I really want to thank her for supporting me at everything I tried to accomplish and for still liking me enough to stay with me. I am really looking forward to our next year.

Magic: the Gathering

2015 was the year I pretty much stepped back from competitive Magic play. While I still played a couple of Grand Prix, I realized that I had to step back from the game to accomplish my more important goals, like finishing my studies. The less time I spend on the game the less success I had at the tournaments I did actually attend. That kind of spiraled into me having less fun to play at all which lead to me even spending less time on the game. Additionally one of my big financial decisions was to not go to all the Grand Prix any longer. So far I was living for the competitive play and once you take that away there is also less incentive to play. Once I have a steady source of income again I do plan to attend more GPs again during the next year and hopefully my fighting spirit will come back.

Poker

2015 for me was the year of poker. While I was stepping back from Magic as I could not afford all the traveling any longer, poker jumped in as a second hobby to search for competition. It is way cheaper as you will actually win some money if you are a decent player and I can play it from home whenever I want. While I already started playing the year before, I pretty much only casually dipped into the game in 2014, although I already built up the base during that time. 2014 was all about toying around with some free money from strategy pages and I made my first pay-in at pokerstars for $20 which I managed to bring up to $80. I picked up the game again at the end of Mai 2015. That was when I started to regularly play multiple times a week while putting serious efforts into learning theory and strategy for the game. During the last 8 month I managed to build up my bankroll from those $80 to a respectable $1300 and by now I am already playing for serious money whenever I play. As you know this blog is about a bankroll challenge I run, too, to build up from $500 (where I stood as I started this blog) to $5000. I have made huge progress already and I am really motivated to continue doing so.

Sports

Sadly I have grown fat in 2015. Well I am by no means a heavy weight, but I gained about 10-15kg which is somewhat unacceptable. The more work I put into my thesis the more I reduced the time to do sports. In a foolish effort I tried to undo all this in December as I started running again after the thesis was hand in. I went out about 7 times in 10 days and at that point my knee was telling me that this is not the way to go. I do have to work out a sustainable plan to regain shape.

Future plans

What are my plans for the next year? First and foremost I want to get a job. I do have several applications running and I already got some good feedback that I can expect my first job interviews within the next weeks. I hope I will be able to start in February, latest in March. Going from there several new possibilities will arise. I want to get a bigger flat for me and Anna. I want to attend more Magic Grand Prix again. Also I want to get a new computer at some point. Somewhere in the back of my mind there still is the idea of starting to stream poker from time to time. Regarding poker I want to keep up the progress I made during the last 7 month. I know I will have less time to do so once I start an actual job, but I hope I can continue to improve my game and maybe even finish my bankroll challenge this year. Last but not least, I want to do more sports again. I really want to get back into beach volleyball which I have not played for almost half a year by now.

Thank you! To conclude I want to thank everyone that supported me during the last year. Special thanks goes to my beloved girlfriend Anna for being at my side the whole time. Again I cannot express how thankful I am about the help my good friend Till was during my diploma thesis, especially the final phase of it. For all the interesting discussions about science, poker and life in general I want to thank my buddy Devil. And for everything they have done for me during the last year a huge Thank you! to my parents.

[mcs1408]

The grind is on

Besides working on some more applications I had a lot of spare time last week. I fulfilled the goals I set the week before of creating my own LinkedIn profile and meeting with a friend at a consulting company that sits close to my place. I used my spare time though to work on my poker challenge again. Normally I play 2-4 hours of poker a day and over the course of a week about 4-6k single hands. Last week I managed to play 4-10 hours per day for a new personal record of 15.2k hands. The start of the week did not go as straight as the last weeks and while I had some swings down and up again by around $40 each I got to the turning point on Friday. I was already winning a bit, as I met fred. fred was an Austrian player at one of my tables. He seemed kind of angry as he was always complaining about the other players at the table via chat and what made it especially fun, he went all-in every hand. Additionally whenever fred got called and lost a full bu-iny of $10 he rebought every single time. Over the course of one and a half hours he managed to spew $300 around the table of which I got my fair share.

Overall I was up about $65 at the end of the week which was quite the success. My bankroll sat at $957 and I was only missing 500 more VPP for the 5k VPP stellar reward of $50. My end-of-the-year goals were looking more achievable than ever. Another interesting thing I learned during last weeks grind is that I am winning more during the later hours of the day. It somewhat makes sense, as later in the day more recreational players come home from work and the tables are softer over all. In addition I realized that during the early hours of the day my way of thinking is just not as precise as once I have already done some other tasks.

Came Monday I did all my organisational stuff during the day and sat down to play again during the afternoon. That’s when things went crazy. Over the more than 50k hands that I have played on my current limit (NL10 - $10 buy-in per table, blinds of 10ct/5ct) I have a win rate of about 9 big blinds (i.e. 90ct) per 100 hands I play. After the first hour of play I had played 650 hands and already won more then $65, i.e. about 100big blinds per 100 hands, which is just insane. I made it to a plus of $72 after 1000 hands when I took a first brake. My bankroll was now at $1029 and I had already reached my $1k goal to jump up to NL25.

After a healthy break I logged in to my pokerstars account again for my first session of NL25. I reduced the number of tables I played simultaneously from ten to four and played about half an hour of pure excitement. Nothing big happened after all. I played about half an hour for a total of 155 hands and won about $10. Still it somewhat felt like the first time I sat at a poker table again. I have to learn again to get comfortable with the amounts played for and it for sure will take some time to get there. But I am very happy I got there so fast.

During all this I received my 4k VPP stellar reward for another $10 and my bankroll is currently at $1049.98. I already more than doubled my starting amount!

[mcs1408]

Preparing the next step

Last week I told you about the strange feeling that comes after achieving a huge goal without any certainty about what is coming next. During the last week I talked to a lot of people about my future plans and I started writing applications. The first one is as a Big Data Architect at Zalando who have there headquarter here in Berlin. My general plan is to first search for jobs in and around my home town and hope this works out. I know there are huge possibilities all over the world, but I want to stay local for now and try one big change at a time. I handed in the application today via a friend who is already working at the company. Applications via contacts are always the most promising as not only it speeds up the whole process and somebody is actually reading your attempt, it is also possible to stay up to date during the process. Besides that useful tips regarding the company you want to work at always help during job interviews. Within the next week I am going to meet another friend that might have an interesting offer for me and I plan on working out a detailed LinkedIn profile that I currently do not possess. Another tip I got was to watch out for interesting groups on meetup that relate to specific topics where you can get in touch with more people already working in your field. We’ll see how all that works out.

Besides starting my carrier planning process I used my spare time to pick up my poker bankroll challenge again. The last time I played during the thesis was at the end of October to maintain my status level at pokerstars and pokerstrategy. There I crashed my bankroll back down to below $800 as I was a little out of shape and not very focused on the whole thing. In fact I did not even benefit from keeping my status, as I did not play a single hand until the end of my thesis and I lost all my status levels during that period. I slowly picked up the grind again after I handed in my thesis. I played the first two sessions during the period I was still programming for the thesis and started playing more in the last week. So far I have played a couple thousand hands and I managed to build up my bankroll to new heights at which it has never been before. Currently my account shows $893.47 which puts the challenge to get from $500 to $5000 at 8.7% of completion.

For this year I have two more goals that I want to achieve. The first is to unlock two more stellar rewards at pokerstars by the end of the year. So far I have earned almost 4000 VIP Player Points (VPP) over the year. At every 750-1000 points you unlock a stellar reward that gives you a certain cash prize. So far I have earned four rewards this year each paying $10 to my pokerstars account. The next reward sits at 4k VPPs and pays another $10. The interesting spot is the one after though, which sits at 5k VPPs and pays $50. At my current play rate I earn about 15VPP per hour, which means I have to play around 70 hours of poker until the end of the year. As I have a lot of spare time within the next week and over the holidays this is very much doable.

My second goal is to climb up in stakes that I play. Currently I am playing NL10, which means with a total buy-in of $10 per table I play (and blinds of 5ct/10ct). Following my bankroll management I move up in stakes whenever I reach 40 buy-ins for the next limit (and I move back down when I fall below 30). As the next limit is NL25 (i.e. $25 buy-in per table) I will move up once my bankroll hits $1000. If I can keep up my current winrate, I should be able to reach that goal within the next 40 hours of poker I play. Interestingly enough if I hit one of my goals I should be able to hit the other one, too. If I make it to NL25 before the end of the year I will earn about 2.5x VPPs for any further play which should make the first goal way easier. If I hit my first goal the additional $50 boost should also be enough to jump me to NL25 unless I run into a huge downswing, which hopefully will not happen.

I will keep you up to date about my j-opportunities as well as my bankroll project next week. Until then, happy Christmas present shopping ;)

[mcs1408]

Calm

I handed in my thesis. I completed all necessary programming that had to be done within the days after. I threw a big party this weekend. Now I sit in my room in silence and everything is so quiet and peaceful. No work to do. No deadline to get. Just me. I have reached a point in life that I have worked for several years. It is exciting to finally be here, yet it is strangely unpleasant not to know what is coming next. For the first time in my life I have to put all my effort into entering a way that nobody can tell me where it will lead to. Nobody can tell me if it is the right way for me or if I should do something completely different. All I can do right now is the obvious. Take a short break of two month to entirely calm down from the stressful last weeks and apply for jobs in the field I have specialized in during the last years. Still something worries me about that obvious thought. Will it work out? Will I get a job in time? Will I be able to work in a big company every weekday? I most certainly hope so, but only time will tell.

Let me talk a bit more about those last weeks and how the final phase of my thesis went. I know I kept you a little short on information, but I could not really focus my mind into writing big articles at that point, which hopefully is understandable. The last time I wrote you after running the second round of performance tests for the second of the two systems I was comparing in my thesis. As i already said those runs were pretty much a disaster. Only a small part of the tests I wanted to evaluate ran without system crashes or flawed system behavior. The week itself was really stressful as I had to do those tests in the university (in contrast to the first round, which I could operate from home) and almost every day I was the one to turn off the lights in the whole building. It took me a while to get to realize that failure is also a result and it was not the thesis only goal to compare the two systems performance wise, but also to compare usability, stability and overall system experience. So on the last day I could work on the cluster I tried to finalize what I got so far and moved on to put those results down.

At that point I had about 10 days left till deadline. So far I had finished about 50 pages of the thesis already which I sent to my good friend Till Riffert for correction. I cannot express how thankful I am to him, as he took a lot of his time within the last days of my writing to help me tune and finalize my thesis. He is an amazing friend and was a huge help! So at that point I sent him those 50 pages and started writing the whole performance test introduction and evaluation. I also realized that I left out some part in the compilation chapter that I had to rewrite, but everything slowly came together. By Friday before the deadline (4 days to go) I started working in all of Till’s corrections and we decided that another “Related Work” chapter was missing, that I still had to write. By Monday after many hours of writing and few hours of sleep I was done. Including the appendix, which is about 15 pages, the thesis made it to an impressive 98 pages, which I handed in for printing and binding the evening before the deadline.

I had an appointment at the examination office at 2pm and gone was all the pressure. Well, not all of it, as I still had some programming to do. I had an agreement with my supervisor to hand in the thesis on time and send him the program about a week later to have enough time to rework it once more after the writing pressure was gone. It was way less stressful than the last weeks before, but I still could not fully relax. I sent him the program 1.5 weeks later in a nice and usable version with a detailed documentation. That was last Friday. On Saturday I gave a big party at my place and we had loads of fun and many drinks till late in the night. Sunday I had to clean up the flat and my hang over. And today I am sitting here and all is gone. A big void paired with a little excitement and hope.

[mcs1408]

It’s done

It is fully written. It is printed. Today at 2pm I am going to hand it in. Thanks a lot to all the help I got during the last weeks! I still have to finish some programming within the next week, but I do have some breathing room again. I am really happy that this project will come to an end soon!

[mcs1408]

Just another quick update

It’s been another two weeks since I managed to put something down here. Still I do not want to leave you in the dark about what is going on. I have not played a single hand of online poker during the last two weeks, but I made great success on my way to finish my thesis. It’s eight days now to the deadline and I am almost done. I finished the performance tests and albeit the second run was a disaster with lots of system crashes, network errors and strange (probably buggy) system behavior, I was able to get at least some results to work with. Besides that failure is a result, too. I am able to document what went wrong and mostly tell why it went wrong.

Currently I am finishing the last chapter of the thesis while a friend of mine is already proofreading the whole thing. Eight more days of work. And after that hell breaks loose ;)

[mcs1408]

Sorry

I was too busy to make a post last week and I will not be able to write another big one this week. Its three weeks now until I have to hand in my thesis and I already got used to working from the point I get up till very late in the evening. I am currently able to make good progress and I am quiet sure I will get there in time, but it is still a lot of work left that needs to be done.

Two weeks ago I ran the first round of benchmarks to examine in detail the performance of Apache Flink. This week I am running the same tests on AsterixDB and so far everything worked out. The week in between I pretty much finalized the first 50 pages of the thesis such that only the evaluation of the testing data and my conclusions need to be written down.

Pokerwise I pretty much did not play at all during the last two weeks. On saturday I decided to throw in a little grind to maintain my current VIP level, as it was the last day of the month. A combination of bad luck and bad play made it such that I crashed my bankroll back below $800. I will probably not play very much during the next three weeks as I realized that I get out of shape really quickly and that I am not winning if I cannot bring my A game. I will probably freeze this challenge until after I hand in my thesis. After that I have a lot of time and will pick it up again and steam up even further! I try to at least post small updates during the next weeks on my thesis progress.

[mcs1408]

A busy week

I already told you about the topic of my diploma thesis. I also told you that most of the programming work was already done and that the main part yet to come was the execution of the cluster performance tests. That is exactly where I am at right now.

Last week was a lot about fixing setup problems, network problems and system “features” that I had to work around. I spent my time spamming user mail lists with problems, updating systems and fine tuning the system setups. In between I worked on the compilation unit, fixing bugs and adding additional functionality to correctly translate the queries that I chose to run as a workload. Currently I am executing those queries on a cluster at my university. I am pretty much working all day and therefor cannot give you all the big updates about it. Maybe next week I’ll be able to give you a more detailed view into the performance tests I am running.

As for my bankroll challenge I played even less poker than the week before, but at that I was quite successful. I played a total of 3.218 hands of cash game and made a total profit of +$56.89. That puts my current bankroll at $829.62 for an overall profit of +$329.62 which puts my challenge to 7.1% of completion.

[mcs1408]

World Series of Poker Europe

Regarding online poker my last week has been even more quiet than the last one. I have merely played 1.8k hands in cash game loosing a little bit. Besides that I gave tournaments another try as I wanted to prepare for the WSOPE event I played on Friday. Over all I played an additional 20 online tourneys and went about break even. I lost around $10 during the last week which is more to me not playing all that much than having a bad run. Unfortunately I will have to continue playing very little, as my Diploma Thesis is going to take over for the next six weeks. The thing I do want to talk about today is the WSOPE event No2 "The Oktoberfest" I was playing. I again have to send huge thanks to my friend who staked me and made it possible to play in my first big live tournament which I could have never supported with my current bankroll. The event itself was a blast. I really enjoyed the atmosphere, the professional handling of each situation and just sitting within sight of your opponents. It reminded me a lot to bigger magic tournaments that I used to play a lot. Before the event I already knew that a good friend of mine that I regularly play with and that I do respect a lot was sitting two to my left. It is a little bit uncomfortable to know such a good player to your direct left, but it also made the total situation way more comfortable to me, as I had somebody to talk to the whole time. 

We met with a couple of friends an hour before the event started and got us some breakfast for a hopefully long day. The closer we reached the starting time the more nervous I became. To make it even worse the friend who staked me had my ticket and obviously he was to late. Luckily the event had a little starting delay and I made it to my table just in time. During the first level of the tournament we played 6-7 handed, as spots were still left open for late registration and probably some registered players did not show up, too. I played a couple broadway hands and was slightly above starting stack sometimes hitting top pair and getting some value out of the two calling stations at our table. The most interesting situation during the first level was me openraising in late positiong with As4c, getting called by my friend. The board came KsJs6d. Usually this is a board that hits my range pretty good and I chose to continue my aggression with a continuation bet. My friend called and as such I knew he was not on total air. The turn was the good old 2c. I put my friend on a mixture of smaller pairs that would probably fold to another barrel, toppairs that would still call a second barrel and flushdraws that would fold here as well. I had the nutflushblocker so I chose to bluff a second barrel. I had already given up after his call, when the flush hit on the river. I knew he was not holding much more flush draws here and that this was a good card to fire a final bluff, as I knew as well, that my friend was able to do tight lay downs and that I would even get top pair and some two pair combinations to fold here. He had a K though, and another one. He snapped me off with top set and gone was half my stack. Ouch. Nice trap by just calling pre flop. The tables were balanced during level 2 of the tournament and we were up to a full 10 player table. After that I folded a lot and with the blinds increasing I was shortly after down to between 10 and 15 BBs so push or fold mode for me. I layed down some KQ type hands in early to mid position and I even folded AJs 10BB deep against a UTG open vor 3.3x the bigblind followed by a call. I was rewarded picking up AQs shortly after only facing an openraise from middle position. I chose to shove in and the raiser snapcalled with A8s really not getting the right price to do so. I am still wandering why he did that, as he looked like a decent player at first glance. I am not shoving smaller pairs than 88 here and I never have weaker Aces. Funny enough I cannot have hands like KQ here, too, as by a dealers mistake the Kc was revealed already and I would never shove in such a hand knowing a king was already gone. My hand held and I doubled up to around 20BB again. Through level four of the tournament I again folded a lot with the break about to follow. I had gotten decent hands like smaller Aces, but never enough to play for the short stack I still was. After the break the blinds did not increase for level 5, but antes were introduced. The first hand they were on I picked up AKo and was facing an openraise. Sitting on about 18BB I was happy to shove it in, which earned folds and myself the pot. Shortly after I opened 77 in early position and with my new picked up chips I chose to openraise. I got a call directly to my left, a raise from the loose calling station, a shove for 1.5x my stack and action was back on me. Against the loosy calling station I might have shoved myself even with action still behind me, but with the reshove I had to duck out of the way. The guy to my left folded and loosy goose called and tabled 66, while the reshover held AK. To be additionally salty my sevens would not only have held up, but even made a Full House on the turn. Still I knew it was the correct play to fold here and I am happy I did so. A couple hands later I picked up AK again and action folded to me in the cut off. My stack was a little under 15BB and as I would have to call a re-shove myself if I just openraised, I chose do directly go all in. My friend in the small blind raised to isolate me and after the bigblind folded he tabled AQ. I was a favorite to double up again and for the first time would have above the starting stack again. The window card was a Q and a K never followed. GG. Overall I am really happy with my play. I liked the bluffing spot I took, especially with the extra information I had about my friend although it did not work out. After that I got my money in as a favourite twice and while it held up once it did not the second time. Still at any given point I would play the exact same way.

Back home I took a glance at the coverage page for the event and I realized, that they put my bust out tweet directly on the main coverage page.

Although it is said my friend in the end did not make the money himself, but funny enough he also busted out loosing with AK to AQ.

[mcs1408]

Bigger Data

Last week I left you with an explanation of the MapReduce programming paradigm for Big Data. Today I am going to pick up that topic again to finally dive into my diploma thesis and what I am currently working at.

As a short recap of last weeks entry: information processing is no longer about a single super computer that does all the work, but about splitting up your problems into small pieces so they can be processed by many computation nodes at the same time. Google first came up with the already called out MapReduce programming paradigm, that I explained in detail last week. Apache Flink (formerly known as Stratosphere) was one of the systems developed to re-implement and improve this idea on an open source base. As it happened to be a collaborative project between three universities in and around Berlin, I got in touch with it quite early and even worked two years as a student assistant at the database chair at my university developing special test cases. As I had a high interest in databases in general and especially in big data systems, it was only natural for me to stay on course and do a student research project with the beautiful name “Execution Plan Enumeration Algorithms in Stratosphere”. This student research project is a smaller thesis that every student has to write before being allowed to work on a diploma thesis. It is somewhat comparable to a bachelor thesis.

By now I moved to a different project group called Knowledge Management in Bioinformatics that I am writing my diploma thesis at. Bioinformatics is an interesting topic as they have HUGH amounts of data they have to analyze and therefor have a natural connection to Big Data problems, too. While I changed the professor, I did not change the project though and Apache Flink (former Stratosphere) is still what I am working at.

Same time, different place. In 2009 researches at UC Irvine, UC Riverside, and UC San Diego came together to found a project to develop a Big Data management system called AsterixDB. While the project expresses the same ideas about parallelization and cluster computing they do have a different approach of realization. Both AsterixDB and Apache Flink have been developed around the same time, both as collaboration projects between several universities, but at very different places. So it would be kind of nice to compare them with each other to see what works out for each of them and what does not, wouldn’t it? This is were I jump in. Part of my thesis is to set up both systems on a cluster environment and compare them by running performance tests on both of them. I get to play around with 72 computation nodes each having 2 processors with 6 cores per processor to do so. That’s is a total of 864 cores that I can toy around with!

To run the same performance tests on both of the systems is kind of interesting. AsterixDB has developed its own query language Asterix Query Language (AQL). Flink does not have its own language though, but only has two APIs (Java and Scala) for which a query has to be written as an executable program before it can be run. The second part of my thesis is to write a compiler that translates AQL queries into executable programs for Flink’s Scala API. That way it is possible to run the exact same queries on both systems and have comparable results.

So far the compiler is complete, baring some bug fixing and planned limitations. The cluster setup for both systems is done, too (and you have no clue how hard it is to set up two beta systems with sketchy documentation). The first small performance tests will be run the week after this only using 4 computation nodes. Hopefully the full tests can be run two weeks after. At least that is the plan currently. 7 weeks till deadline. I hope everything works out.

The Bankroll Challenge

Poker-wise it has been a quiet but successful week. I have played 4.133 hands of cash game, as well as 5 tournaments of which I cashed three, but had no deep run as the week before. My total online profit this week was +$85.22 putting my current bankroll at $783.10. This makes for an overall profit of +$283.10 since the start of my challenge, which is 6.3% of the way towards my target bankroll.

On Friday we had another private live cash game session. I usually buy in for three bullets of 10€ each (we are playing NL10) and be done with the evening if I bust out. The last couple sessions I have always been down to my last bullet before I was able to turn things around and score some huge pots. This time it was exactly the same. I tank-called a friends limp/4bet-shove with AQs (which might or might not have been correct) only to run into his KK. Luckily I hit an Ace and even made a full house till the river and doubled through him. Starting with that suck out the session turned around for me. I got several big hands over the rest of the evening and scored some huge pots in difficult spots. In the end I packed a nice stack of 140€ for a total profit of 110€ for that evening.

Upcoming next will be the WSOPE event “The Oktoberfest” this Friday, that I got staked for. I am really looking forward to that one and it will be insanely fun, as at least ten people I know will play in the event, too. Let’s see if we can get something big going! :)