A very rewarding part of my teaching job is being able to accompany talented engineering students in their project work, on their way to becoming IT professionals. It’s particularly nice when I can use my decades’ long experience of making my own problems, mistakes, missteps, goofs and screw-ups to keep them out of the unpleasant traps I spent so much time in!
The following is a short summary of the Bachelor theses I’ve been privileged to be involved with.
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ElasticSniff by Severin Thalmann |
| This work was carried out jointly between Swisscom and the Bern University of Applied Sciences. It’s covered under a non-disclosure agreement, so about all I can say is that it was a wonderful project involving software engineering and network technology to solve an important business challenge! In addition to his new computer science skills at the BFH, Severin was already a talented and experienced network engineer — and it is a real pleasure to work with students who bring deep experiences with them!
Technology: (not able to disclose) |
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Digital Retirement Planner by Markus Yoder |
| Markus was not just a student at the BFH, but in fact he was a professional financial planner. His Bachelor thesis was about uniting finance with IT in an easy-to-use retirement planning tool that could be used by anyone, without a “lock in” to a specific financial services company. Due to the nature of the calculations, his application embedded more business logic than I’ve seen in a long time.
Technology: Ruby-on-Rails, MySQL, React, using a Secure-by-Design (SbD) approach in which security aspects were considered beginning in the design phase |
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Online Ticketing System for FC Biel/Bienne 1896 by Jonas Herzog and Adrian Berger |
| What happens when two quality-obsessed perfectionists team up to work on a project? This was an important project, superbly executed by Jonas and Adrian, for laying the foundation for the football club to grow and reach the next level. A detailed risk analysis proved invaluable in dealing with third-party issues, and a make-buy analysis proved invaluable for optimizing the build effort. Due to the quality of their work, these students obtained special recognition in the BFH newsletter.
Technology: PHP/Laravel stack, with Breeze, Blade, Vite, Vue, Tailwind CSS with MySQL |
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Infrastructure as Code by Gaylord Rohlfs |
| This project was carried out under a non-disclosure agreement, so I can’t talk about many details, except it was a very successful comparative study about usecases for IaC and products. A particular pleasure of coaching this product was that Gaylord is a very experienced IT professional in the widest possible sense: not just programming but SSN (server, storage, network), datacenter, as well as mobile device management. It’s terrific to work with students who bring such a broad and deep background of skills!
Technology: (not able to disclose) |
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Food Truck Finder by Mei Yung Wong and Chun Fatt Wong |
| It is always fun when students choose to do a project based on their passion or their hobbies, and in this case it was all about food trucks – or at least, finding them. While still not as popular in Switzerland as in other countries, Switzerland does have a foodtruck scene, and the idea here was to write an app so that foodtruck enthusiasts could search for foodtrucks, find new ones in their area, and even write reviews.
Technology: Microsoft .NET |
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enstutz.ch – Entwicklung einer Online-Spendenplattform by Carolina Osei Alvarez |
| It is always fun when students choose to do a project based on their passion or their hobbies, and in this case it was Carolina’s passion to help people. After surveying over 10’000 people (itself an accomplishment!) she discovered people are willing to give small donations to the homeless, provided they could trust that the money would be used for food. So she developed a sophisticated mobile app to make this possible!
Technology: Spring Boot, Next.js, PostgreSQL |
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A tour history algorithm for a fleet of e-vehicles by Marius Lauener |
| Sometimes students choose thesis projects related to their jobs. Marius was a software developer with Switzerland’s largest e-vehicle delivery company, Quickpac AG. He wrote a very complicated application that integrates various real-time telemetry data to provide important details about package delivery and ways to optimize it.
Technology: Microsoft .NET with ASP.NET, Blazor and MS SQL Server |
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Miro als Classroom-Tool by Petru Lazar |
| Miro started out as a whiteboarding tool, but now it is a central platform for enabling team collaboration in all areas! Sadly, what’s good for collaboration is not good for teaching. Teachers have a big requirement for confidentiality, so that some things (exams, but also homework) are shared exclusively between teacher and student. Petru created a web-app using the powerful Miro REST API in order to give teachers the ability to handle Miro boards privately with their students!
Technology: Miro, Miro REST API, Python. |
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Collaborative Trip Planner by Lukas Moser |
| This was an important project,
Technology: PHP/Laravel stack, with Breeze, Blade, Vite, Vue, Tailwind CSS with MySQL |
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HomeSpeak by Danaël von Bergen |
| When he is not jumping out of perfectly good airplanes, Danaël carried out real research into Internet-of-Things. He designed an insanely complex end-2-end system comprised of Raspberry PI, ESP32, WLAN, MQTT together with cloud computing, speech recognition — all designed to test what would and what would not work for a voice-controlled home automation system! This was by far the most complex environment in any of the Bachelor theses I have supervised.
Technology: Raspberry PI, ESP32, WLAN, MQTT, Python, Google Voice, Bluetooth – and about 20 other technologies! |
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Learning Management System for Rural India by Tobias Erpen, Alayne Hiltmann, and Lukas Vogel |
| Alayne, Lukas, and Tobias worked hard and developed something that is already starting to help improve lives. They’ve created a “made-for-rural-India” application to help the teachers and students in rural India take online classes. They worked closely with Arvind Kamath, the Managing Trustee of the Sharada Educational Trust, to develop the Sulabh app. The final part of the work involved a trip for everyone to India, where they visited local villages and carried out field tests with the rural Indian teachers and their students! In my view this was the only Bachelor team I have seen in a long, long time that did not just develop a prototype, but in fact a real productive app that is — as of August 2024 — in use by over 100 students at two government schools in India!
Technology: Java Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Angular |
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Digibot – A GenAI solution for personalized digital assessment tests by Christian Schmidhalter & Roman Schneiter |
| We have all had the displeasure of taking a boring examination at some time or other – often the questions are so boring they make us fall asleep. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if each of us could receive custom-tailored examinations, written specifically with each of our unique profile in mind. Well, this is what Christian and Roman did. First, they created a ChatBot to ask a potential test-taker questions and thereby learn their “user profile.” Then, they created further harnessed ChatGPT to use that profile to transform boring, generic questions into custom-tailored questions. They could have stopped here, but they turned the work into a genuine scientific research project by running experiments with over 50 users, collecting data, analyzing that data – all to answer the question about whether those custom-tailored questions were really helpful or not.
Technology: Vue, Python/FastAPI, LangChain |
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Logbuech by Sabine Kalbermutter, Wiktor Kepczinski & Thierry Mühlemann |
| This was one of the more frustrating theses I’ve had the pleasure of coaching. Why was it so frustrating? These folks did a stunning job of creating a user-friendly app so people could maintain a share their links: links to movies, links to books, etc. — even measuring how user-friendly it was and incorporating that feedback into the design. And yet despite how wonderful and user-friendly it performs (at the time of this writing) they don’t intend to turn it into a real product and create a start up!
Technology: Google Cloud SQL PostgreSQL, Google Cloud Run, Java Spring Boot, SveltKit with Tailwind CSS |
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Sulabh App 2.0 by Marcel Pfister & David Zbinden |
| I think this thesis probably belongs to the category of “once in a lifetime theses” — although probably I would put more than one theses into this category. After suffering a significant delay of nearly a month (because a project partner in India failed to deliver a promised API) Marcel and David completely changed the goals of their thesis. They created a highly usable app to enable students in rural India to learn via gamification — AND it was deployed into production in June 2025! Interestingly — and what many students sadly don’t realize, but Marcel and David do — the fun gamification part was about 30% of their app. The more boring admin aspects (user management, classroom management, teacher dashboards) were necessary but took up about 70% of the work.
Technology: Microsoft .NET, Vue.js, Google Cloud SQL PostgreSQL, Google Cloud Run |
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Receiptbox: A universal receipt manager by Nathan Luè & Daniel Matt |
| I’ll probably remember this thesis for a long time because it is NOT what I expected; or better to say, not what I could have imagined! My colleague Moritz Meier had the idea of creating an app so that users could manage their receipts — ok, there are already about a zillion of these apps on the market, but his idea was to focus on a generic solution so users could import their receipts directly at the Point-of-Sale. Demonstrating my own lack of vision I could not conceive that anyone could create anything useful, given the complexity and diversity of the POS landscape. But Nathan and Daniel created a solution I could never have dreamed of: they created a real hardware solution (camera, Raspberry Pi, all stored in a rugged, 3D-printed housing) that nearly any store could easily install on their PoS systems — as part of an overall “systems integration” approach that includes a central server, a local server, and a mobile app — interfaced to a real PoS based on Odoo. Sadly, Nathan and Daniel are headed for stunning careers in the IT security industry, but Moritz and I will continue with this idea . . . perhaps it will one day lead to a start-up?
Technology: Python/FastAPI, 3D-printing, Odoo, MySQL, OCR, Firebase |
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