WHOIS …? Reinhard Scholl

WHOIS…? is a format in our tech blog where we present you the many faces of our tech community. These are the people, that work every day on our state-of-the-art technical solutions to make BurdaForward so unique.

What’s your name & what techie cliché is totally true for you?

My name is Reinhard Scholl and a tech cliché that I truly fulfill is that I have geek t-shirts like "WANTED Dead AND Alive - Schrodinger's cat" and "ba zn ga" (Big Bang Theory).

Another stereotype is that my personal IT equipment always beats my business IT equipment?. 

What is your role at BurdaForward?

I am currently the director of the Testcenter team. 

What is the job of your team at BurdaForward?

The Testcenter is located on the ground floor in Munich with some rooms in the basement. Some call it the “mysterious secret unit” of BurdaForward, but actually we have an open-door policy – just say hello (“mellon” should also work…). Transparency towards our users is important. We understand consumer products and evaluate how good they are in a systematic and verifiable way. So, we mainly develop test concepts and test products against these concepts. This is mostly visible under the umbrella of the CHIP brand. 

Running the Testcenter is fun and hard work at the same time - because of the dynamic nature and the never-ending flow of new and (maybe - maybe not) innovative products - but it is also challenging. We have limited resources and our clients are editorial teams as well as the test seal unit. More recently, we have also been a driving force in providing services to the “Das Produkt”-team (www.dasprodukt.de). After all, if we know what makes a good product, why not build it (or have it built) to our specifications?

When & Why did you start to work in tech?

I started programming in 1983 on an Apple IIe, back then in UCSD Pascal.

And if you just have a “Déjà-vu”, you are right: Thomas Koelzer wrote the same on the tech blog (Just that I had one of those "newer" Apple IIe instead of the II model). Strange coincidences... :-) Also, UCSD Pascal was a rather alien operating and file system at that time. Most people learned “Basic” or “Turbo Pascal”.

Check out the WHOIS….? interview with our CTO Thomas Koelzer here.

This was the pioneer time when it came to Hardware and Software. You really tried to understand "the machine" – in every bit and byte. I then studied Informatik (computer science) and quickly learned that systems already were way too complex in order to understand every bit. So, the challenge is taming the IT-beast.

However, the key fascination remains even today: Make and use a universal machine that can do in principle anything what you want it to do. Same ambitions now and then. 

By the way, as for artificial intelligence: I was indeed involved in the beginning 90s during my studies: Machine learning, neural networks, real time translations: It all was there. Just the machines were not fast and big enough. 

Later in life I was mainly involved in IT-Security topics, worked as sales engineer and took on more and more entrepreneurial roles.

What is your favorite part about working in tech?

You either work on the future or are close to it. What new products do you want to build? What do they ultimately do for the people who use them?  It's a very exciting thing.

What is your “tech superpower”?

I can explain public key cryptography.  And I do extreme mind mapping (anywhere, anytime, with and without tools).

What advice would you like to give techies out there?

It's all about use cases. If you're not clear about why, what and how the system or software is going to be used, you're lost. Before you get into the details and do the works, you need to be clear about what you want the outcome to be and how people will use it. 

Although I think sometimes it's worth playing around and just doing it. Often breakthrough innovations are unpredictable, so you can't ask users about them in advance.

Did you find any nice tool/software/technology/… recently that you would like to share?

Today's AI systems are indeed amazing. I like to switch from typing to speaking. It's quick. Of course, you then need one more step to clarify all the words that gush out of your mouth, as we don't normally speak the way we would - say - write a paper or prepare a presentation. On Windows I use the built in system (just press WIN+h) on the android smartphones I use Google Notes which itself uses google speech services.

Can we find out more about you on social platforms (LinkedIn, GitHub, Tech Blogs, Link to an article on our post…)?

Things are a little quieter there. I had a stock market blog on stock3.com for many years and was part of the founding team of a start-up that uses AI image recognition to monitor the coronavirus testing process on mobile phones. Now that the coronavirus pandemic is over and the start-up no longer has any money, this job is over. The stock market blog is also currently dormant. All that remains is Facebook and LinkedIn. But I do write for CHIP from time to time.

Any famous last words?

“Never surrender dreams” J. Michael Straczynski (one of the greatest story tellers of all times)