Tag Archives: Jena

Interesting Reading, Misc, Xceptance

Xceptance Supports Young Explorers with Donation to Witelo e.V.

The little Ozobot speeds around the corner, flashing colorfully, winds its way along a spiral, collides briefly with one of its colleagues and finally finds its way through the maze. It is navigated to its destination by color sensors on its underside, which allow it to follow a defined route. The miniature robot was not programmed by a high-tech engineer, but by Magnus, 10 years old, and the son of our co-founder Simone Drill.

During a programming workshop, he learned to give commands to the Ozobot and to control it with the help of color codes.  This was made possible by witelo e.V. from Jena, who offer working groups and experimentation courses at schools, as well as extracurricular learning formats. These scientific and technical learning venues were founded to promote so-called STEM education, with computer science as one of its components. Students learn the basics about coding, robotics and algorithms in research clubs, on hands-on days and during a wide range of vacation activities. In this context, Magnus also had the opportunity to playfully gain his first programming experience and took his enthusiasm from the workshop home with him.

Source: Ozobot

Word of Witelo’s work quickly spread among the Xceptance staff, and numerous children followed Magnus’ example. Here, the offspring are following in the footsteps of their parents, who are also involved in programming, software testing and development at Xceptance.

“It’s close to our hearts that our children remain curious and have the chance to test their skills, so we would like to contribute to the dedicated work of the association with a donation”, says Simone Drill. “We want to spark young people’s excitement for IT topics and help them to gain perspectives for their career choice.”

With more than 80 network partners from research institutions, companies, associations and initiatives, witelo has established itself excellently in Jena over the past ten years. In addition, there are schools from Jena and the surrounding area, as well as many private individuals who enrich the educational landscape with their commitment. This positive development encourages managing director Dr. Christina Walther in her work: “Students should learn how important an understanding of science and technology is in their everyday lives – but also what great job opportunities the STEM subjects offer.” That’s why she stays in close contact with the parents of her course participants and promotes partnerships with companies like Xceptance. This ensures that the valuable cooperation between schools, science, and business continues to enrich the technical education of young people and that fun and learning don’t exclude each other.

Managing Director Dr. Christina Walther at witelo headquarters

About witelo e.V.

Witelo is the network of science and technology learning sites in Jena. The goal of its work is to get children and young people excited about STEM subjects, i.e. mathematics, computer science, natural sciences and technology. A broad alliance of city, business, and institutions supports witelo – the work of the association is financed by supporters and sponsors.
You can find further information on the numerous offers and activities on the witelo website.

Conferences, Interesting Reading, Performance, XLT

Data Science Day 2022

After a two-year break, on 18 May 2022, the 4th Data Science Day Jena took place. The Friedrich-Schiller University is hosting this mini-conference format annually.

Xceptance presented this year a closer look at the data that is collected and processed during load and performance testing. René Schwietzke, Managing Director of Xceptance, talked about the challenges to capture the right data as well as translate the collected data into meaningful results. 

A load test simulates millions of user interactions with a website and therefore is capturing huge amounts of data points. These have to be transformed into a few numbers to make the result of the test easy to communicate but still preserve important details. The talk started with typical business requirements and expectations of the target groups of a load test. It showed the data XLT captures and the dimensions which later drive the data reduction. A few example data series demonstrated the challenges behind the data reduction and what numbers are finally used to satisfy the requirements.

An example load test result illustrated the talk with real data. That example test run created about 17,500 data rows per second which contain about 293,000 data points. The entire test result consists of 3.2 billion data points. This massive data set is turned into a consumable report by XLT in less than six minutes. 

For everyone with an interest in data science, this presentation also offers ideas for research in regard to unsolved data challenges. There might be even some Master’s and Bachelor’s theses topics waiting for you. 

You can find a recording of the presentation below (courtesy of Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Jena).

This is the accompanying slide deck. It is a Reveal.js-based. You can navigate with the spacebar and the arrow keys.

Picture of the presentation


Xceptance

Xceptance at 11th Charity Relay in Jena

Yes, we did it again. We’re athletic and we care for our community, so we took on another sports challenge and had three of us participate in the 11th Relay Race in Jena, a charity run covering a 3x2km distance.

We had a lot of fun and did pretty well but most importantly we’re happy that this year’s funds will be donated to the Kindersprachbrücke Jena e.V., a local organization devoted to helping refugees and migrants, especially children and their families, learn German and find a new home in Jena.

Xceptance

Open-Air in Jena – kulturarena 2015

Logo KulturarenaWe are again supporting Jena’s widely acclaimed KulturArena Open-Air to contribute to local arts and culture. The international festival, which is held right in downtown Jena, is famous for hosting musical acts from all over the world.

This year’s performers include well-known artists such as Tanita Tikaram, Roachford, and Element of Crime. As always, visitors can also go to movie nights and theater performances. We’re excited to be a part of the biggest open-air event in Thuringia.

So come on out and enjoy exciting summer nights in Jena!

Xceptance

Xceptance at 5th Jena City Corporate Running Challenge

On May 20, 2015, we again joined Jena’s greatest sports and charity event, the Jena Corporate Running Challenge. Every year local companies and organizations go on a 5 kilometers run in downtown Jena to promote sporting activities and, more importantly, raise money for local programs and institutions devoted to help others in need.

We had a lot of fun and all of us tackled the whole distance. This year’s funds will be donated to various charity projects in Jena: the Paten für Demenz project for people with dementia, the mental health charity Aktion Wandlungswelten, and the Stiftung Hodenkrebs dedicated to research on testicular cancer.

Xceptance

Xceptance Goes by Bike

From May 9 – 29, the city of Jena hosts the so-called Stadtradeln event, a nation-wide campaign initiated by the Climate Alliance to foster climate protection and bicycle-friendly communities. Everyone is invited to get together in teams and compete for the most miles commuted by bike.

Banner StadtradelnA total of 46 teams is going to cycle in Jena and we are proud to announce Xceptance is one of them this year. Throughout the next couple of days we will therefore ditch our cars, get on our bikes as much as possible and track our miles as well as CO2 emissions saved. It is not that important to us where in the ranking we will end up: as an international company we still care about our local environment and we are happy to contribute in our own small way to climate protection and an eco-friendly Jena.

Xceptance

Videos of TEDxFSU Jena

About a month ago, we proudly sponsored the TEDxFSU event in Jena. Today, the videos of all talks came online and of course we want to share them with you, because the TEDx mission is free access to education. Enjoy: Videos of TEDxFSU Jena.

This is one of the talks in which Peter Perceval discusses the connection between humor and innovation.

Xceptance, XLT

Inaugural XLT Summit in Jena

On January 19-20, 2015, Xceptance held its first XLT Summit. About thirty representatives of well-known companies from a variety of fields, including finance, retail and eCommerce, all of whom use XLT to help them in developing web-based software applications, accepted our invitation to meet at Xceptance’s headquarters in Jena, Germany. The goal of the conference was to give XLT users the opportunity to discuss their experiences using our tool both with each other and with the internal XLT development team.

To kick things off, on January 19 we enjoyed a casual dinner in a local restaurant. The next day there was a varied program consisting of presentations contributed both by Xceptance colleagues and external users. Our customers reported on their practical experience using XLT, and had a chance to discuss their results with the other users. The many different applications of XLT–from load testing to test automation to application monitoring–were thus illustrated in light of actual day-to-day practice. A selection of these presentations can be found here: http://goo.gl/fPJj1Q, and parts of the presentation provided by our guests from OTTO.DE can be read here: http://dev.otto.de/.

In addition, the XLT development team presented the newest XLT features. Our guests had the opportunity to speak directly with the developers about their specific feature requests, some of which we were able to immediately agree to implement.

In short, the conference was a great success. In response to the overwhelmingly positive feedback from the participants, the XLT Summit will now be a regular annual event.

Last but not least, we would like to thank all the attendees, without whose engagement, interest and suggestions the event would not have been possible!

Misc

Applications Open for E-Commerce Professorship

The Department of Industrial Engineering of the Ernst Abbe University of Applied Sciences Jena, Germany, invites applications for an endowed full professorship in E-Commerce / E-Business commencing March 1st 2014.

Xceptance supports the university’s bachelor’s degree program that is to comprise classes such as shop management, social media, or online marketing. We believe that education and innovation are major essentials for both personal and national development and therefore want to contribute to this program by providing both financial resources and professional knowledge.

Detailed information can be obtained from the website of the Ernst Abbe University, Jena in English and German.