riedel.wtf

Oct 10, 2015

Ferienakademie 2015

This year I participated in Stefan Wagner’s team “Extreme Coder Camp” where we focussed on developing software using an agile strategy, called Scrum. We developed an Eclipse-Plugin for the programming language “CamlLight” using the agile approach. The standup-meeting in the morning ensured that everybody has an appropriate work to do for the day and to see how the progress has been since yesterday. The results were noted in our breakdown-chart. All exercises were stored in our backlog with an estimate for the work effort.

Jun 20, 2015

TravelHack at SFO Hackathon: SafeStay

THack was a hackathon organized by the airport administration. The hackathon took place within SFO – the airport of San Francisco. Larissa and I decided to participate in the hackathon before flying home. Inspiration Two German developers came to San Fransisco two years ago for Apple Developer Conference. Looking for a cheap and convenient place to stay, they booked a room at a hotel at Tenderloin, SF. However, they had no idea that Tenderloin was an unsafe place at nights.

Jun 14, 2015

WWDC 2015 — The epicenter of change.

It was great to experience Apple’s WWDC on a Apple scholarship with a strong focus on developers and great software releases. Meeting our friends at Apple and other companies in the Silicon Valley was amazing and we’re looking forward to seeing you again next year! At this year’s WWDC Apple showed the new OS X El Capitan, iOS 9, watchOS 2, Swift 2 and Apple Music – speaking of music: this is Larissa and me singing karaoke at a bar in San Francisco:

Feb 28, 2015

Wikipedia Open Culture Hackathon in Bern: Cultural Music Radio

We built a “cultural music radio” which plays suitable music depending on your gps location or travel route. Our backend server looks for artists and musicians nearby the user’s location and sends back an array of Spotify music tracks which will then be played on the iOS app. We use a python server backend to process RESTful API requests. Clients can send their gps location and will receive a list of Spotify tracks which have a connection to this location (e.

Jan 15, 2015

Evernote Apple Watch Hackathon:  Watch Vocab Trainer App

Evernote organized an AppleWatch hackathon in Zürich. There I met with Arik, whom I know from previous WWDCs. We developed an Apple Watch app which helps to learn vocabulary on the go. We use different sensors to determine when the user is idling, for example waiting at a red traffic light. We then push a little exercise notification which includes one vocabulary. This can help to learn a new language on the go without a big effort.

Dec 1, 2014

Hackathon Stuttgart 2014: MealHub

MealHub was our project at the Hackathon Stuttgart 2014. We developed this app to be able to meet new people, cook and eat together. The initial problem was the lack of lunch options at our university. But what if every dorm could be a canteen? Cooking for five people is not much more time-consuming than cooking for one or two. After all we received the “price for best project”. After winning the hackathon we decided to continue working on MealHub and release the app on market.

Nov 3, 2014

Halloween Hackathon 2014: Kolumbus, a cultural travel buddy

Kolumbus is an intelligent, gps-based iOS application + server-backend, which reminds you to visit cultural institutions, when you are already there. The idea is to encorage especially young people to enjoy cultural highlights without additional effort. This project was rewarded with “Price for best Application”. The source code is available on GitHub.

Oct 15, 2014

Paypal’s BattleHack London 2014 – RunForIt!

We developed an app which helps to collect donations for charity by running. People who participate pledge a certain amount of money for every mile you run which is then automatically collected and donated to the charity organization. You can select from different charity organizations manually who should receive the donations which are collected by your running activity.

Oct 10, 2014

Ferienakademie 2014

Ferienakademie is a voluntary holiday academy organized by three Universities from southern Germany: Freie Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Technical University of Munich (TUM) and University of Stuttgart. It takes place in Sarntal, which is a beautiful high valley near to Bozen in Italy. This year I participated in Albrecht Schmidt’s and Björn Eskofier’s course “Mobile Gaming and Sports”. The goal of the course was to develop a system that motivates participants to do more physical activity in a playful manner and therefore increase their life expectancy.

Oct 5, 2014

New Bus-Tracking Feature Available in “Krautfest App”

In 2013 we published the first app-version for Leinfelden-Echterdingen’s annual “Krautfest”. The festival is visited by more than 100’000 visitors on one weekend. The new app also contains a bus-tracking feature, which shows the location of the Krautfest-bus-shuttles live on a map – that’s a brand-new feature which isn’t even available in the official VVS app! We presented the app at the press conference last week. The app is available for iOS and Android.

Jul 17, 2014

IBM Hackathon Uni Stuttgart: Weather-Alarm App

At IBM’s bluemix hackathon we developed an iPhone app with intelligent weather capabilities: The app can wake you up earlier when harsh weather conditions occur (for instance snow). It is also able to warn you before certain weather conditions appear using the weather forecast. All calculations are done on IBM’s bluemix backend system, which then sends out a push notification to our fronted iPhone app. Read more about the hackathon and our project on IBM’s website.

Jun 10, 2014

HP Hackathon San Francisco 2014: Reviewily

A single restaurant can have thousands of reviews. Way too much noise to actually get exactly what you may want. At Reviewily we help organize the reviews, ratings, and comments so you can dive directly into what you care about, what people mention a lot, and you can be a more informed customer. Using IDOLOnDemand API (Sentiment Analysis) we pin point specific topics people people care about when reading reviews & comments.

Jun 8, 2014

WWDC 2014 – Write the code. Change the world.

This week was totally inspiring and probably the best week of our life. It was great to get in touch with Apple engineers in the labs to get help with our app projects, especially iRedstone. Apple presented iOS 8, OS X Yosemite and the new Swift programming language. On top of that we met many great people, including Jony Ive and Craig Federighi! We’ll see you again next year!

Feb 24, 2014

iRedstone hits 1’000’000 downloads, Top 5 most downloaded app in Germany, featured on TV

We’re proud to announce that our app “iRedstone” for iOS, Android and Mac OS has been downloaded more than 1 million times! At the same time we reached another milestone: iRedstone is among the top five most downloaded apps in Germany – being downloaded more often than Doodle Jump! iRedstone has been featured on television, watch the excerpt here:

Feb 20, 2014

PennApps 2014: AmaScreen

Our goal was to create an API for connecting different mobile devices of all types to one big screen without huge afford for the users. Our product is web-based, which means you don not have to install any software on your device to use it. Therefore we used Websockets, so you just have to type in the server’s IP and can connect. Via our server’s webcam we take pictures of the different devices that should be connected.

Dec 3, 2013

“Yet an other conference” in Moscow

“Yet another conference” is the name of the technology conference by the famous Russian company “Yandex“. I met two developers from Yandex at WWDC earlier this year and they invited me to come to attend their conference as well. It was a great conference and I met lots of people there!

Dec 3, 2013

Hackathon Stuttgart 2013: Multiplayer GravityGuy Game

We developed a game which can be controlled using a smartphone. The controller is a website which uses touch-input events which are then transferred to out server which displays the game on a large monitor-matrix. The school where this took place offers such an monitor-matrix, this is why we came up with this idea. Up to for players can play together using their smartphones as controller and seeing the game on the monitor matrix.

Jun 19, 2013

WWDC 2013 – Where a whole new world is developing.

This week was amazing, exciting and exhausting! Everything started with a little scholarship picknick near to the golden gate bridge that Larissa and I organized. It was great to meet all the scholars already and talk about our expectations for the keynote and the whole week. This was also the place where the legendary scholarship group picture in front of the golden gate bridge has been taken: WWDC 2013 Group Picture: Larissa Laich, Ari Weinstein, Nick Frey, Arik Sosman, Rohan Kapur, Jaden Geller, Johannes Erschbammer, Peter Schreuder, Ethan Vaughan, Coulton Vento