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 |
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| This was an important project,
Technology: PHP/Laravel stack, with Breeze, Blade, Vite, Vue, Tailwind CSS with MySQL |
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Collaborative Trip Planner by Lukas Moser |
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| 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 |
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| This was an important project,
Technology: PHP/Laravel stack, with Breeze, Blade, Vite, Vue, Tailwind CSS with MySQL |
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Learning Management System for Rural India by Tobias Erpen, Alayne Hiltmann, and Lukas Vogel |
| This was an important project, superbly executed, 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: Java Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, Angular |
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