The Best Thesis of the Year

Competition The Best Thesis of the Year was announced by ABRA Software company at the end of September. One of the competitors was our longtime colleague Mirek Vavruška. In the interview below you can get to know a project with which Mirek entered into the competition or what he is working on at the moment.

Hi. Firstly, congratulations on the master’s degree you have just successfully obtained. How is it for you to be a fresh graduate?
To be honest, I haven't realized any big difference. At the end of my second year at University of West Bohemia I joined Syntactic Sugar. From now, you will just meet me in the office more often ;-). One of the things that every graduate experiences right after the graduation is not having student discounts and advantages anymore.

Why did you decide to sign up for The Best Thesis of the Year competition?
I signed up for the competition because I wanted to compare my thesis with the works of other students. I am quite a competitive type of person so this was a great challenge for me.

You signed up for two contests. What were the differences?
There was a big competition in both of them. Around 80 competitors signed up for each of these contests. There were 6 cathegories in the one announced by ABRA Software company. One of the cathegories, for which I signed up was „Corporate information systems“ in which I won the 1st place. In the other contest announced by Profinit company was only one common cathegory and I was on the 8th place.

Could you please shortly describe the project you entered the competition with?
Topic of my thesis is "InnoQ Document Management System". InnoQ is "InnoForss Quality Management System" in short. InnoQ is a quality control system defined by InnoForss institute. Huge amount of documents was developed when the Institut was creating this system. My task was to make an application that would help to effectively keep these documents under control.

Basically, it is a system for document administration that I have developed for finnish research institut. My first contact with the institut was during my study stay at HAMK University of Applied Sciences in finnish town of Forssa. InnoQ Document Management system is written in PHP and works under MySQL database. System is able to work with all common used MS Office and OpenOffice document formats. It is possible to search within documents. Interesting is that system is automatically able to convert documents into PDFs. Considering the international character of the project I have written my thesis in English.

How did the competition go?
The process of both of them was very similar. Jury selected the best works from all that were signed up and all selected went to final. During the final we were presenting our work to a professional jury and we were also answering all curious questions of the jury members.

How did you actually get to this project?
In Finland I recieved an offer to work on the project. I really liked the idea to solve a real business problem and to practice the communication with the customer in English. By the way, this experience was later on a big advantage for me in Syntactic Sugar. I got offers to participate on several projects but I liked this one the most. I liked that results of my work will be finally used in practice.

What are you currently working on?
Currently, I am working on a very interesting project for our customer from United States - Owen Software company. Goal of the project is to create a web application that helps students with choosing the field of study and future profession. The application includes three complex psychological questionnaires. As a result, there is a list of fields of study and professions that fit the student the most. ASP.NET 3.5 technology is used for implementation together with MS SQL 2008 database.

Thank you very much for your answers and I wish you a lot of working and personal achievements.
DThanks for the interview ;-)

Roman Sterly