synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

Today’s my first day as a full-time employee at flinc where I’ll mainly be doing Ruby on Rails development. I got in contact with Michael a few months back when he joined the Web Development Fulda group on Xing. We met at the meetup in september and a few days later he invited me to their offices in Dieburg. I was impressed by their product and the spirit of the team, so I agreed on doing trial work for a week. Obviously they liked me and my work and offered me a job.

About flinc

“flinc arranges spontaneous rideshares in realtime. Directly on your navigation system in your car.”

The idea of flinc is to connect smartphones with satellite navigation systems to arrange rideshares in realtime. For riders this results in an alternative to an own car, for drivers it’s an easy way to reduce their costs.

flinc is currently tested in the city of Friedrichshafen and is planned to be rolled out in several innovation regions in 2011. Head over to flinc.org to register and get more information.

Pair with me!

As I’m the third developer at flinc, we’re looking for another Ruby on Rails developer to join the team. If you’re interested in pair programming with me (or of course one of the other developers) while working on an exciting product, send a mail to Michael.

... and messed it up.

Last week I’ve been giving a talk (in german) about the project I did during my internship at the Human Computer Interaction Research Center at the university of applied sciences Fulda. This was the first talk I gave (not counting those I had to do in school and for university) and of course it ended up a little awkward. I didn’t intend to do a live demo at the end but somehow I changed my mind during the presentation. Of course nothing worked like expected … ;-) Lessons learned for next time. If you’d like to see the disaster yourself there is a video available.

I got my thesis’ topic last week and will start to write it within the next few days. I decided to write it using TeX as all my attempts to write large documents in OpenOffice.org caused very bad headaches. The TeX approach fits my needs much better and I can use GIT much more effectively to manage the changes to the documents. With TeX I could even apply patches to the document … how cool is that? :-) Just imagine sending the document to someone else for proofreading and getting back a patch that can be instantly applied without having to search every passage that had misspelled words in it. Maybe I’ll post some links that helped me getting into all the TeX stuff in the near future.

During the last week I built a new design for both the blog and the website. The website isn’t finished yet but today I decided to update the blog’s design. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Additionally I updated the underlaying Mephisto Blog and added Sven Fuchs’ Paged Article Lists Plugin.

I’ve had a great weekend again, seeing Nightwish doing two amazing shows. First one on saturday in Leipzig, the second one in Frankfurt on monday. I took several pictures and uploaded a selection of them to the Nightwish.com Gallery:

• Photos of the Leipzig show on saturday
• Photos of the Frankfurt show on monday

To give you an idea, here are some of the best ones: