Walid Maalej is an award-wining software researcher, passionate educator, and creative handyman. As Professor of Informatics at the University of Hamburg in Germany he teaches software development basics to 500-700 students using fun activities and pair-programming. His advanced software engineering courses often include a big portion of Data, Machine Learning, and Empiricism and are based on real challenges from industry and society. Prof. Maalej was named earlier “The Early Stage Scientist of the Year” by academics and the German Association of University Professors (DHV). His work was cited thousands of times and received a.o. the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, IEEE RE Best Paper Award, MSR Most Influential Paper Award, as well as Awards by Google and Microsoft. Prof. Maalej worked as developer, manager, and consultant for numerous companies and organizations including Siemens, Tata Consultancy Services, Rohde und Schwarz, and Telekom. He received his doctoral decree from TU Munich with distinction and is also a proud alumni of the Center for Digital Technology and Management.