Meet Konstantin Tennhard Jun 17 2014

Could you introduce yourself in a few lines?

Hi, I'm Konstantin Tennhard. A computer scientist from Darmstadt, Germany. I truly love my profession; both, the scientific aspect, as well as, the technical aspect. When it comes to computer science, machine learning and natural language processing are the things that fascinate me most. When it comes to building software, Ruby is probably my number one choice, but there are other language I find particularly fascinating: Go, JavaScript, Objective-C, Python, and R. When I'm not building software, I spent my time with photography. I also have a passion for good food, which is especially why I look forward to being in France very much.

You're giving a talk at Rulu this year. What will you talk about?

My talk is about large-scale Rails applications and the challenges we as developers face everyday. We start with a generic discussion on two of the most challenging aspects of software development: growth and change. In the second half, we explore how to model complex business processes so they can adapt to changing business requirements. Best of all, there will be a lot of code samples.

Three properties:

• You code with: Vim
• You test with: RSpec
• If Ruby was forbidden, you would code in: Go

What Lyonnaise specialty will you give a try this year?

What are you working on these days?

I'm doing a lot of machine learning and statistical data analysis these days. Apart from that I maintain smart_properties and composable_operations, which will both be covered in my talk. I'm also admittedly a little obsessed with my shell environment. There are those days where I almost exclusively work in the Terminal. My bash configuration can be found on GitHub. The most interesting part about it is probably the web-installer. It makes provisioning new VMs so much easier.

What are the talks, books, libraries or commands you think more people should be aware of - because, well, they make your life so much better!

• Terminal
  • tmux
  • vim
  • vagrant
• Ruby
  • middleman
  • transpec
• JavaScript
  • shower.js
  • AngularJS
• Books:
  • Growing Object Oriented Software Guided by Tests
  • Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  • Introduction to Statistical Learning with Applications in R (only if you ever wanted to learn something about machine learning)
  • Learn Vimscript the Hard Way

Anything to add before we wrap this up?

I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of great people and to enjoy some French food along with some good French wine.