Christoph Matthies

Hi, I'm Christoph.

I'm an IT-Systems Engineer, living in Berlin.
I enjoy building things, both with code and with my hands.

Send me an email, see my bibliography,
view my CV (in English or German) or
find me on one of the services below!

Recently I ...

Developed an AI automation that derives docs changes from code diffs at SAP's AI Hackathon.
Attended a Meetup at SAP Berlin on the latest AI technologies and careers in AI.
Visited an exhibition at Humboldtforum on the history of the GDR's Palace of the Republic.
Checked out the art deco houses built in Miami Beach in the 1920's.
Visited the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral and watched a rocket launch. 🚀
2025
Successfully defended my PhD dissertation at HPI's Digital Engineering faculty. 🎓
Visited the art exhibitions of the MINSK art gallery in Potsdam.
Ran the "AOK Firmenlauf" in Neues Palais, Potsdam. Fun times!
Took a short trip to the medieval town of Prenzlau.
Presented our work in SAP AI Core to students as part of the 2024 HPI-Connect fair. Thanks for all the discussions!
Took part in the 2024 ADFC Sternfahrt. Great to ride the bike on the Autobahn!
Took part in the Berlin "Team-Staffel" run, handing over a cuddly SAP Signavio gazelle to the next runner.
Took part in the opening of the Potsdam AI-Studio by Fraunhofer IAO and Uni Stuttgart.
Completed the Certified Scrum Product Owner training, refreshing core product management techniques.
Coached student teams of the TaC seminar at HPI, presenting GenAI use cases to SAP's CEO Christian Klein.
Attended the TRANSFORM 2024 conference in Berlin, focused on AI use in enterprises.
Joined a talk on trading and investing by Trade Republic in SAP's Berlin office.
Started working on topics in SAP AI Core.
2024
Started a full-time position as Senior Product Specialist and Scrum Master at SAP in Potsdam.
Attended a fantastic WMSEE'23 workshop at Imperial College London on the topic of Software Engineering Education.
2023
Wrapped up the fantastic time I had as visiting scholar at CMU in Pittsburgh, supported by a Fulbright stipend.
Reviewed papers for the Advances in Teaching and Learning Technologies track at HICSS-56.
Was happy to see a summary of our CHASE'22 conference discussions published.
Reviewed a manuscript for the Journal of Systems & Software.
Was happy to join the panel of judges in the ACM Student Research Competition (SRC) at ICSE'22.
Chaired an ICSE'22 conference session in Pittsburgh on Teaching and Productivity.
Attended the 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2022).
Attended the 15th Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2022).
Was happy to volunteer in organizing the FormaliSE'22 conference in Pittsburgh.
Reviewed papers for the EuroSPI'22 conference as part of the Program Committee.
Attended the virtual SEENG@ICSE'22 workshop on the topic of Software Engineering Education.
Attended sessions at the Camunda Community Summit 2022 Unconference, focusing on microservice orchestration.
Joined a really fun Critical Mass bike ride in Dahntahn Pittsburgh.
Chaired a virtual ICSE-SEET'22 session on Teaching SE Skills.
Learnt a lot in Michael Hilton's and Françeska Xhakaj's 15-890 CS Pedagogy graduate course at CMU.
Volunteered at CMU's Random Distance Run 2022.
Attended AgileAlliance's Agile MiniCon on Earth Day 2022.
Went to a live baseball game for the first time 🏟
Was happy to give a guest lecture on Remote Collaboration in CMU's 17-642 Software Management Theory course.
Volunteered at the 2022 FIRST Robotics Competition and watched robot teams dunk basketballs.
Was certified in the QPR Gatekeeper Program by CMU Counseling Psychological Services.
Enjoyed the ACM TechTalk by Titus Winters on the topic of "Software Engineering at Google".
Was happy to host industry guest lectures from PlanetScale, SAP and mobile.de in our HPI Software Engineering course.
Joined the Program Committee of the ICSE'22 DREE workshop.
2022
Attended Agile Alliance's 2021 Agile MiniCon conference.
Was happy to support the ISEC'22 conference as Publicity Co-Chair.
Saw my pet project Twitter bot @dev__urandom reach over 10k tweets.
Was happy to serve in the Program Committee of the SEET Track at ICSE'22.
Took part in the 2021 AWSome Day Online Conference.
Served in the Programme Committee of the LASD'22 conference and reviewed papers on Agile and Lean development.
Was happy to see our 2021 Design Thinking Research book chapter published.
Listened to fascinating talks at the Wikimania'21 conference.
Refreshed my Design Thinking knowledge by completing a Design Thinking in Organizations OpenHPI course.
Built a Twitter bot that irregularly shares the wisdom of /dev/urandom.
Reviewed papers for HICSS'22 on Agile software development research.
Served as Student Volunteer in the virtual ICSE'21 conference.
Reviewed papers for the EuroSPI'21 conference as part of the Program Committee.
Took part in the AWS Innovate: AI/ML Edition online conference.
Served in the Program Committee of the SEENG workshop at ICSE'21.
Presented our research on Data-informed Retrospective Activities at the LASD'21 conference.
2021
Summarized our tips & best practices for new student Scrum tutors.
Attended and volunteered at the (virtual) ESEC/FSE 2020 conference.
Attended the Future SOC Lab Day including a talk on the Corona-Warn-App's details.
Volunteered at the PROMISE 2020 conf on data analytics in Software Engineering.
Volunteered as an Ambassador in the IEEEXtreme 14.0 programming competition that hosted 7,300+ participants.
Took part in the AWS Dev Day on Modern Application Development.
Tested the new BER airport in Berlin before its offical opening.
Joined GitHub's virtual Octo(ber)fest event and learned about Beer-Ops.
Took part in ApacheCon@Home 2020, including talks on data exploration and GDPR's Right to be Forgotten.
Caught talks at the all-virtual Microsoft Ignite 2020 event, particulary on Azure.
Went and hand-picked some old potato variants at Berlin's Domäne Dahlem.
Checked out this year's Festival of Lights illuminations in Berlin.
Went 🚴 on the Berlin Friedrichstraße, which was completely closed for car traffic.
Attended Fuzzcon Europe 2020, the European online conference on fuzzing.
Took part in the Future Mobility Summit 2020, concerned with developments in German urban transportation.
Was happy to join the Program Committee of the (virtual & free) LASD'21 conference.
Joined the Corona DIY bread baking trend.
Visited Szczecin, Poland's seventh-largest city, on a short day trip.
Published freely available preprints of our CHASE'20 papers on arXiv.
Attended the SEmotion 2020 Workshop on emotion awareness in SE.
Volunteered at ICSE'20, assisting with virtual presentation sessions.
Presented research on "Playing With Project Data in Retrospectives" at ICSE'20.
Presented two research papers on Human Aspects in SE at CHASE'20.
Attended a workshop on using Grounded Theory by Prof. Dr. Manuel Wiesche.
Took part in the 2020 AWS Summit Online EMEA virtual conference.
Went kayaking in "Neu-Venedig", a water-rich area close to Berlin.
Attended the all-virtual Microsoft Build 2020 event.
Reviewed for the Conversational User Interfaces (CUI'20) conference.
Optimized my workflow by fetching papers' BibTeX entries directly from doi.org.
Was happy to see the report of our Dagstuhl seminar on bots in SE published.
Attended the Software Engineering (SE'20) conference and presented our work on agile practice use in teams.
Attended the 6th Industrie 4.0 conference in Potsdam.
Took part in the AWS Innovate Online Conference: AI and ML Edition.
Attended a talk by Hannes Grassegger on the Hong Kong protests and the "smart city" as the enemy.
Peer-reviewed for the IEEE Transactions on Games journal.
Was happy to receive a Certificate of Recognition for serving as a peer reviewer of the EMSE journal.
Went ⛷️ in Austria.
Visited a restored WWII-era surgery bunker in Berlin.
Was happy to see our HICSS'20 paper on Retrospective headaches and remedies published under a CC license.
2020
Attended and volunteered at 36c3 in Leipzig, featuring fascinating talks.
Discussed technical standardization at the 2019 IEEE Standards Impact Event.
Attended the DQ Symposium on "The Art of Creative Transformation" at the World Economic Forum.
Presented my research at the 2019 HPI Research Symposium in New York.
Attended the 6th openHPI-Forum on Social Learning and met Dr. Vint Cerf.
Took part in a Dagstuhl seminar on the topic of Bots in Software Engineering.
Presented my research at the HPI 20th anniversary conference.
Attended talks at ApacheCon Europe 2019, especially on the EU-FOSSA 2 project.
Published a paper preprint on Scrum Retrospective problems and remedies.
Started teaching our 2019/20 undergrad Software Engineering course.
Presented at the 2019 Fall Retreat of the HPI Research School in Potsdam.
Celebrated my 100th edit on the English Wikipedia.
Visited Neuschwanstein Castle and hiked the Tegelberg on a short Bavaria trip.
Presented our paper on counteracting Retrospective problems at EuroSPI'19.
Presented my research at the HPI Research School at NJU Nanjing Workshop.
Attended an interesting meetup on the topic of "Building High Performing Teams".
Attended a talk at BER and visited the unfinished airport.
Presented our research on Agile SE practices, software bots and feedback in Scrum at ICSE'19 in Montréal.
Attended the annual SAP SapphireNow in Orlando and presented HPI research.
Introduced school pupils to the basics of collaborative software development, git and building websites.
Presented my research at the 14th Annual HPI FutureSOC Symposium.
Built a clock from an old HDD.
Published preprints of our ICSE-SEET'19 and BotSE'19 papers on arXiv.
Visited Prague for a weekend.
2019
Attended 35c3 featuring many interesting talks and a great atmosphere.
Attended ESEC/FSE'18 and presented my research at the Doctoral Symposium.
Rewrote our interactive Ruby on Rails and TDD tutorial on GitHub. Try it out!
Presented our FIE'18 paper on analyses of development artifacts in teaching.
Published a preprint of our FIE'18 paper on development data for teaching assessment.
Presented a paper at SEEM'18 on integrating Scrum and Kanban in university courses.
Taught school pupils the basics of agile software development at university.
Published a preprint of our SEEM'18 paper on integrating Scrum and Kanban in university.
Peer-reviewed papers for the Frontiers in Education 2018 conference.
Presented a poster on my research ideas at the 13th Annual FutureSOC Symposium.
Attended a talk on the topic of Spectre & Meltdown by on of their discoverers.
Attended a workshop with researchers at the University of Cape Town.
Taught an undergraduate university course on agile software development in large teams.
Was happy to host a GitHub guest lecture on the topic of "DevOps @ GitHub Speed".
2018
Attended 34c3 in Leipzig.
Presented my research at the 9th HPI Symposium at SAP headquarters in Walldorf.
Was happy to see our approach for teaching software engineering featured on the GitHub Education blog.
Attended the 2017 HPI Symposium at SAP Next-Gen in New York.
Presented a paper at QRS'17 on identifying domain experts in software projects.
Attended a meetup on Bayesian Analysis using the Stan software.
Taught agile development methods to pupils using a Twitter Bot and LEGO.
Attended a talk by Richard Stallman on Free Software and GNU/Linux.
Constructed an aluminium laptop stand.
Attended talks on machine learning and Google DeepMind projects at TU Berlin.
Built a hidden bookshelf drawer.
Attended a Puppet-Workshop by Example42.
2017
Attended the 33rd annual Chaos Communication Congress (33c3).
Held a short lecture on Lean Software and Kanban.
Was happy to present a paper on metrics in university SE courses at FIE'16.
Couldn't find a good RSpec Ruby testing framework cheat sheet and created one.
Presented a paper at ASE'16 on mining software repositories.
Attended the IETF 96 meeting in Berlin.
Wrote about how we try to teach agile software development in an agile way.
Attended a meetup on software development at HERE.
Presented papers at the ICSE'16 conference and the CHASE workshop.
Got certified as a Scrum Master by Scrum Alliance.
Joined the HPI Research School, focusing on Software Engineering methods.
Created a Twitter bot that tweets from /dev/urandom.
2016
Built a bedside lamp from tree branches.
Presented a paper at ICSESS 2015 on reverse engineering techniques.
Wrote and defended my Master's Thesis on measuring Scrum implementation.
Created an example of the basics of TDD for Ruby on Rails, for use in teaching.
Wrote about git tricks for an undergraduate university course.
Read Bertrand Meyer's excellent book "Agile!: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly".
Took part in the Nokia HERE 1-day mapathon.
Decided to keep events on a website instead of just using Twitter.
Thanks for reading!