About Me

I’m a former professional programmer now researching program comprehension and programmer expertise with fMRI, eye tracking, and other psycho-physiological measures. I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Software Engineering of Saarland University/Saarland Informatics Campus in Germany. I conduct fMRI studies at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Magdeburg.

In my past free time, I have published 200+ technical tutorials on Future Studio and 70+ videos on programming topics on YouTube.

Important News

• Nov 2024: I am on parental leave for the second time for the birth of my daughter! :)
• Jun 2022: Our study on effect of data analysis tools on eye-tracking data was accepted at ESEM 2024.
• Dec 2022: My PhD thesis won the University Award of the University of Technology Chemnitz!
• Jun 2022: Our EEG study on programmer efficacy was accepted into FSE 2022.
• Apr 2022: I successfully defended my PhD thesis (thesis pdf, presentation slides)!
• Jan 2022: I started my postdoc at the Chair of Software Engineering of Saarland University/Saarland Informatics Campus.
• Aug 2021: Our fMRI study linking code complexity metrics and programmers’ cognition won the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2021!

Selected Publications

I also provide a full list of all publications, including links to PDFs.

• Dörzapf, T., Peitek, N., Wyrich, M., & Apel, S. (2024). Data Analysis Tools Affect Outcomes of Eye-Tracking Studies. Proc. Int’l Symposium Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 96–106.
• Peitek, N. (2022). A Neuro-Cognitive Perspective of Program Comprehension [PhD thesis]. University of Technology Chemnitz.
• Peitek, N., Bergum, A., Rekrut, M., Mucke, J., Nadig, M., Parnin, C., Siegmund, J., & Apel, S. (2022). Correlates of Programmer Efficacy and Their Link to Experience: A Combined EEG and Eye-Tracking Study. Proc. Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering.
• Peitek, N., Apel, S., Parnin, C., Brechmann, A., & Siegmund, J. (2021). Program Comprehension and Code Complexity Metrics: An fMRI Study. ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award. In Proc. Int’l Conf. Software Engineering (ICSE) (pp. 524–536). ACM.
• Siegmund, J., Peitek, N., Brechmann, A., Parnin, C., & Apel, S. (2020). Studying Programming in the Neuroage: Just a Crazy Idea? Communications of the ACM.
• Peitek, N., Siegmund, J., & Apel, S. (2020). What Drives the Reading Order of Programmers? An Eye Tracking Study. In Proc. Int’l Conf. Program Comprehension (ICPC) (pp. 342–353). ACM.
• Peitek, N., Siegmund, J., Apel, S., Kästner, C., Parnin, C., Bethmann, A., Leich, T., Saake, G., & Brechmann, A. (2020). A Look into Programmers’ Heads. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), 46(4), 442–462.
• Peitek, N., Siegmund, J., Parnin, C., Apel, S., Hofmeister, J., & Brechmann, A. (2018). Simultaneous Measurement of Program Comprehension with fMRI and Eye Tracking: A Case Study. Proc. Int’l Symposium Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), 24:1–24:10.
• Siegmund, J., Peitek, N., Parnin, C., Apel, S., Hofmeister, J., Kästner, C., Begel, A., Bethmann, A., & Brechmann, A. (2017). Measuring Neural Efficiency of Program Comprehension. Proc. Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, 140–150.