The six weeks at Fraunhofer this summer was a really great experience that I’d hardly like to miss. We implemented a people search engine that, with some love, could compete against Wink. And that within 4 weeks with only three highly motivated students (including me ;-) and without making any money out of it!

During the first two weeks, it turned out that Java really sucks. To see why, take a look at the next picture:

Getting an “java/lang/Object not found” error is maybe the worst thing that can happen to you when you program in Java. And that was only one of the many problems our Java-guy had to tackle. It was a real fight! Respect! After two weeks we couldn’t see him suffering any more and as such converted him to Ruby ;-)

While the one was fighting with Java, our hard-core Ruby scripting guy with long hairs managed it to see the following picture on his screen:

From this point on, we did all our crawling stuff on a separate server, far far away :)

The last picture shows the activity of “us three”. Notice the number of commits of “Others” in the picuture, which actually is zero. As I only made it on the second rank, I wrote a three liner Ruby script and “slightly” faked the statistics. Too sad that we don’t have a picture of that :)