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I’m done!! Three weeks ago I handed in my diplom thesis. The practical part was the design and implementation of a distributed, replicatable outliner with the NoSQL database CouchDB. As theoretical work I evaluated Distributed Systems, CouchDB, various web technologies and programming strategies. I still have to pass the oral exam, but my degree is finally very close - soon I can call myself a graduated computer scientist. Yay!

As soon as academic procedures allow it, I’ll publish the text and the source code of the thesis here. Until then I’d like to say thank you to a few people. As the foreword of thesis won’t get as much attention as this blog, I’ll do it here.

First first first of all, my appreciation goes to my boys at home and my parents for backing me up by spending loads of time with my child. Not only my professional life is based upon their support. THANKS.

Further thanks go to:

Upstream for generously sponsoring a part of the time I spent researching - especially Alex Lang for his support and coming up with the initial idea. Without them I probably would have done some usability study for the drawer, or I would have had lots of fun in some enterprisey Java company. Also I felt I wanted to strive hard to write good code in my thesis to match Upstream’s high standards for code quality and test coverage - not a bad thing.

Allround guru Jan Lehnardt - he not only knew and happily provided the answers to all questions I had about CouchDB, databases in general, JavaScript, LaTeX, typography and virtually everything else; he was also constantly encouraging and guiding me to contribute to open source projects, trusting in my skills and doing awesome things. One day I’ll also submit a talk to one of your conferences, word :-)

Jan Lehnardt, myself and Alex Lang on the couch with thesis.

My professor Stefan Edlich for doing a great job in mentoring me. He is also the university professor with the most phenomenal email response times I have ever heard of.

Urs, Andy and Ischa advised me on the structuring and helped to make the result look quite scientific. They patiently explained to me how to go about writing such a long academic text. Ischa also is one of the very few people who actually read the whole thing in one piece.

Several lovely people who helped at certain points during the research or the programming, listened with interest and/or assisted figuring out specific problems: Pat Allan (getting started was the hardest part); Urs again (many small and big issues all along the way); Frank Prößdorf and Lukas Rieder (figuring out with me what a Couchapp actually is); Till Klampäckel (skilled advice about Lounge and EC2); Kristina Schneider (tricky CSS shit); Thilo Utke and Sven Fuchs (die HTMLUnit bug, die); Ian White (this one bug in the code you had no idea what it was for but figured it out anyway); and various people from the Ruby and Javascript communities who helped me to shape my ideas by asking basic or challenging questions.

Some more people who wrote great open source programs, did great support and were always open to ideas: my thanks go to a good part of the CouchDB community here, and also to Aaron Quint and TJ Holowaychuk.

Finally my army of proofreaders! I split the text up in very small parts so that also people with a limited time budget had no excuse - I can really recommend this approach ;-). The list includes almost everyone mentioned above, and also: Adrian, Anne, Birgit, Bumi, Diana, Eike, Flo, Grushi, Helge, Jan S., Micha, Neels, Ole and Patrick.

The very last one goes to my sweetheart for brightening my life in those last stressful months.

Thank you everyone! I’m glad to know you all!!