I’m a student and musician born and living in the beautiful hometown of Mercedes Benz and Porsche – Stuttgart, Germany. Currently I am enrolled at the University of Applied Sciences – HdM Stuttgart doing my Bachelor’s Degree focusing on different new ways of displaying data in a more useable way.
I think it’s kind of hard to get someone to know through a website. Because of that I simply wrote down some statements about me. I also listed the most important projects I was in and a basic CV.
Statements
- I’m fascinated by the social internet including its networks and blogs. Especially the influence of the whole new social web on society and human behaviour is a field I definitely want to research because it’s affecting all generations.
- I’m not happy with the usability of the most IT systems. Although IT specialists are working on bigger problems, there’s one thing not to forget about: It has to be easy to use, or it will die. And I think most things are still too complicated to use. Because of that I’ll focus my bachelor’s thesis on that topic.
- I’m totally into music and audio processing. As a musician and producer I am really floored what you can do with computers when it comes to audio. Since quite a long time I’m producing music and playing concerts live on the road. Lot’s of different projects started like: Is an interface more useable if it gives you audible feedback?
- I need sports as a counterpart for long hacking sessions. I love to play volleyball – beach volleyball in the summer – and snowboarding in the winter teaching kids for free how to catch the next great ride. Actually that’s the moments that generate the best ideas to solve problems.
Most important projects
This project was born as an experiment for my bachelor thesis entitled Super Social Everybody. The experiment tries to profile prospective employees with the help of their Facebook account. It searches and filters in all posted items and fotos for the appearance of selected patterns and words. Additionally it calculates ratios with different variables to classify the profiled user. The aim of the project is to see, how the privacy settings can affect the profiling results and what quality the results have in general.
Give the profiler a try online here profiler.mi.hdm-stuttgart.de
So in the experiment I used the following technologies:
- Facebook SDK
- JavaScript & JSON
- Object based PHP
- Facebook Connect
- Facebook Query Language – FQL
This is a project I started out 2 years ago at the university. The idea is to make the organization of projects in small businesses much easier by always adding contacts, media, events and mails to a project and have those projects managed from one place again. When I started the app I made a Java client with a Swing interface that every user in the business had to install. That was the first version of Durchblick. But I think the future is the browser so I rewrote the app using Ruby on Rails. That is the current version of Durchblick. This time I connected all the services like mail, contacts and events with the google services to an account to make them accessible through mobile phones, too. The media can now be stored on the rails server or the Amazon S3 cloud storage. All that is done using an asynchronous message cue that I wrote in Ruby because I didn’t want to block the user interface which is the browser request. As a next step I completely open sourced the project on github to get some feedback about coding style and support – and offer the app to the open source community for free. I’m still working on the app as it is already used in a handful of businesses.
So what did I deal with in that project:
- Ruby and rails
- Test driven development
- Message cues and asynchronous event processing
- Google XML APIs
- Caching – Page, Action and Fragment
- IMAP
- User Interface – This site design is part of the result
Lotus Connections Facebook Integration
I created this during my internship at the IBM Research & Development Lab in Böblingen with Ansgar Schmidt. The assignment was to include the Facebook profile also on the Connections profile in an easy and lightweight way. So we had the idea of simply putting something like a plug on top of the browser and leave the Connections sources just the way they were. We did this by injecting JavaScript code while the profile was loading. This was kind of hard because we had no information on how the facebook login data for the requested profile was. So we endet up parsing the Facebook uid out of the profile context, firing requests to the facebook api, and render the results back into the profile page.
So what did I deal with in that project:
- JavaScript Code injection
- AJAX
- Facebook API
- Integrating User Interface to the current
- enormous timing and sequence problems
This projects was my first experience with cloud computing. I often had the problem that I bought or did something some time ago and the simply fact of knowing when needed to be calculated back with some kind of evidence of the date. So I started out writing this simple app for the google appspot which really turned out to be surprisingly easy. I still use the app today as I still think it’s really handy. You can try it out as it’s still in the cloud.
So what did i deal with in that project:
- Python
- Cloud Computing
- Google Cloud API
Sawubona Music Jam is an IBM Corporate Social Responsibility Project to support Township Projects in South Africa and I developed an open social gadget that allowed the musicians to share their music bits and peaces with each other. It’s still in use and uses ning.com as a gadget container.
This is a workshop I wrote to dive into the whole process of test driven development with Ruby on Rails. During my internship at the IBM I held a few lectures and workshops for the employees to dive into the rails way. They allowed me to publish this on my blog which was very great to share my knowledge with some other folks out there.
Bachelor’s Thesis – Social User Interfaces and Complex Event Navigation
I’m currently writing my thesis so there’s no blog entries about it yet. But I’ll definitely focus on different ways users navigate in applications. I have lots of ideas for new methods how this could be done and of course I’ll try them out. As soon as I have something cool ready, I’ll post it!
CV
| Time Period | Occasion |
|---|---|
| Upcoming in Fall 2010 | Master Degree@? |
| Since Summer 2007 | Bachelor of Computer Science@University of Applied Sciences HdM |
| 07/2006 – 06/2007 | Working self-employed for southdesign.de including various projects with 3D animations and websites |
| 07/2003 – 07/2006 | University-entrance diploma – kind of like the high school graduation |
| 07/1993 – 07/2003 | Elementary school and General Certificate of Secondary Education |
| 1986 | Born in Stuttgart, Bad Cannstatt |
Contact me
Of course there’s lots of ways to get in touch with me, simply choose the appropriate one for you:
- Mail: tommylefunk [at] googlemail.com
- Twitter: twitter.com/tommylefunk
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thomas.fankhauser
