Henrik Sterner
Graduate of computer science and mathematics with a minor in psychology from the University of Copenhagen.
Half techie, half teacher, full-time believer that something wonderful happens when curiosity and code collide — usually after several attempts, too much coffee, and an alarming amount of cola.
Teaching and Interests (a.k.a. Things I Think About Too Much)
I teach computer science and mathematics at the high school level — which means spending my days explaining why code doesn’t work and pretending it was supposed to do that.
My classes these days cover subjects like Applied Machine Learning and Data Science — where we take messy data, feed it to algorithms, and act surprised when it learns the wrong thing, Programming and Software Development — turning caffeine and optimism into code (and then into error messages) and mathematics — the subject that ruins all the fun in programming by insisting on being correct.
I also work with teachers taking their pedagogy exams in computer science and mathematics — mostly helping them rediscover that teaching is 30% content, 30% empathy, and 40% pretending you’re not panicking.
Check my github for more information.
Before teaching high school, I was a teaching and research assistant at the University of Copenhagen, guiding students through Algorithms and Data Structures and Advanced Algorithms. I loved it — mostly because it let me talk about recursion in public without being judged.
My interests these days orbit a few recurring themes:
- Machine Learning & Data Mining — especially when applied to computational finance. I’ve worked on predicting financial time series and stock prices, which is basically teaching machines to make the same bad guesses humans do, only faster.
- Didactics of Computer Science — figuring out how to get students to think like computer scientists without making them hate computer science. In 2017, I helped design Denmark’s Programming B curriculum. In 2023, I published a paper on object-oriented programming for high school students.
Earlier adventures include:
- Computational Geometry & Topology — once used for protein structure prediction. You can read more in this paper, if you’re into shapes, molecules, and suffering.
- Parallel and Distributed Algorithms — because waiting for your code to finish is for mortals.
- Computability and Complexity Theory — the academic equivalent of reading horror stories about what can’t be done.
Book
I am the co-author of the book "Programming in P5" together with Peter Sterner. The book uses P5.js for creative coding and visual programming.
Technical Skills
I’ve been writing code for over thirty years — which means I’ve lived through enough programming fads to know that “the new hot framework” is just last year’s bad idea with better marketing. In that time, I’ve dabbled in procedural, object-oriented, functional, logical, and scripting paradigms — or, as I like to call them, “five different ways to make the same mistake.”
My adventures have taken me through web development, game development, algorithm design, compiler design, data science, machine learning, and software engineering — basically anything that starts with enthusiasm and ends in stack traces. These days I mostly write in Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, Java,C#, and C/C++. The real challenge isn’t the syntax — it’s remembering which language I’m in before I start shouting at the compiler.
Curriculum vitae
My CV is available upon request — a concise record of many years spent teaching, coding, and occasionally convincing computers to behave. Please contact me if you’d like a copy or further details.
Contact
If you’ve made it this far, you either have questions, comments, or a remarkable attention span. You can reach me at henrik.sterner@gmail.com — I usually reply faster than my code compiles (but no promises).