During the last month my blog was rather quite. I dicided that I was aiming to submit my first paper to a top conference with a deadline of november first. Well besides the fact that I almost forgot about the fact that I also have a private life – as well as my collegues helping me with the paper – there were several lessons learnt:

1. If your advisor tells you that the deadline is to short he is probably right! We beat the deadline but the cost for doing so was really high.
2. Physicists rock like hell. Evaluating my algorithms I did many experiments together with Jonas Kunze my partner at metalcon. I was totally amazed by the way he approached meassuring things. I rememberd my time as an undergrad standing in the lab meassuring things for my physics classes. Despite the fact that I knew a usefull skill was being tought to me I hated it and decided to go for pure mathmatics… Well I now learnt the hard way what I didn’t learn as an under graduate.
3. Things become clearer when you really dig into it. It is amazing how all the practical runtimes of my graph data base index for social news feeds – let’s call it GRAPHITY – matched the theoretical runtimes. But while evaluating you see how bad experiments have been designed in the planning phase and you reajust. Even if things work out right a way several times I got a deeper understanding by just seeing and feeling it.  What I want to say things are more complicated than you might think after 2 minutes, half a day or half a month of thinking.
4. The whole learning experience was really nice and it was more about techniques for scientific working than the graph databes index.
5. If your advisor tells you to change notation it is most likely true that even though he is not as deep as you in the topic he has more experience and changing notation is a good idea! Even though I was totally convinced that my notation was great ( at least I have learnt how to model things while studying mathmatics) it made things more complicated. After I finally listened to my advisor things worked out like magic (at least concerning notation)
6. people in university have a very different approach to people in consultancies. But if the deadline comes closer both work until late at night!
7. Freedom is perfect! Thinking of the problem and solution I did not have many conferences and current research topics in mind. I thought of practical problems for improving metalcon. While emerging with my ideas the first criticism was that my motivation was not scientific. Well screw that! As soon as you really work on describing the problem and doing evaluation you do the science!
8. You can always generalize. I was pretty sures my skills in doing so are quite good. Well now I now there is space for improvement.
9. Structure, structure, structure. You cannot have enough structure!
10. Making a traffic light status overview document in Google docs or some other collaborative system as my friend Heinrich Harmann showed me during “schüler akademie” as he has learnt with McKinsey & Company is really good invested effort and time!
11. neo4j is really a cool and exciting technology and the guys in sweeden are really helpfull and cool.

I guess I could boar you all has hell for the next couple pages. I actually should even do this because I know myself i will never come back and right down what is in my mind right now. That is the reason why I publish this here right now at 2 o’clock in the morning!