This blog is a challenge to myself. Not only on the technical side - using vim & git on Heroku - but first and foremost because of writing. ~

As you can probably tell by reading some of the articles here, neither is English my mother tongue nor am I used to write texts.

During our studies (Computer Science BSc) we are not asked to do a lot of writing, at least not prose. I guess it will be hard for the majority of our term to put together a Bachelor thesis which is required to be ~60 pages long. I don’t blame the University but I think it is very important to stay in the loop, to keep practicing which eventually pays off. Not only in terms of style but also to let the mind wander, phrase thoughts and be able to get comments on all this.

The Trigger

Rather by accident, I discovered I enjoy writing. A few months ago in November 2010, I got to know an Erasmus Exchange Student who I would do exercises for one of our lectures with. She didn’t speak German very well, so we did our work in English.

She is a math genius and was able to solve all the mathematical exercises we were given; she has a strong scientific kind of mind. For me, solving these kind of problems requires way more effort.

But exercises not only demand results, they also demand proper presentation. I was the one who had to express our findings in short and concise answers because she simply wasn’t able to - at least she said so, ha. “You do great exercises but beat around the bush too much” read one of the comments on an answer in the very beginning of the semester.

I read loads of English texts on a daily basis - mostly (technical) stuff on the web I’m afraid, but also magazines & fiction novels during the holidays. Besides, I try to watch movies with the original audio and also enjoy watching English presentations / interviews I stumble upon when surfing the web. I think this all contributes to my vocabulary and style of writing. It may not be the best way but it seems I can get a lot out of this.

This is how I got to write most of our textual answers and the results satisfied us both. Our combination worked out pretty well, an appropriate score paid us off. And I do believe we both learned something new, besides course material, during the term - either how to solve mathematical problems more efficiently or how to keep answers short and to the point.

She also encouraged me to keep this up, I had “a gift” she insisted. I blushed.

This blog is a continuous challenge to myself. So bear with me but please let me know when something is just plain wrong.

I’m glad I got things started here.

Thank you, A.

---