As I’m currently working to get a master’s degree in university, I had to write a seminar paper. I got lucky and the topic “Chatty Things – Making the Internet of Things Readily Usable with XMPP” sounded very interesting to me As the title suggests, the paper describes how the XMPP protocol can be employed to facilitate user access to smart devices in the Internet of Things, and some thoughts on preventing information overflow on the user. If this sounds interesting to you as well, you should read my paper or scroll through the presentation slides The paper is licensed as CC BY-ND 3.0 (of course, you shouldn’t use it for your own paper :P), the presentation slides are CC BY-SA 3.0, and if you want to re-use it, have a look at the L^AT_EX code.

Apart from the matter handled in the paper, I also acquired some additional skills:

• Learn to motivate myself. The Pomodoro technique, in conjunction with chocolatey sweets for extrinsic gratification, seems to work quite well for me.
• Learn to use TikZ to draw figures in L^AT_EX. I already wanted to use it for a while, but it seemed complex and have a steep learning curve. It turns out that the TikZ/PGF manual is very illustrative, and has an exhaustive index for easy skimming.
• Learn to deliver a good(?) talk. I recently discovered speaking.io by Zach Holman, and apparently the tips he gives there seem to work and I felt much more secure than on previous talks. Also: a lot of practice. And test sessions. And I ditched his advice on slide design, I like my slides with latex-beamer :P