About

I am a programmer, skier, mountain-biker, dancer and wannabe chef-de-cuisine 🍕

My hobby became my job: from modifying games written in Basic on the C64 while in primary school to teaching myself C++ in High School I ended up doing an internship at a company specialized in writing high resolution graphics software.

From there I was involved in all kinds of different software fields, writing online games for advertising agencies, automating the generation of print quality PDFs and logistics tracking for final product, designing and implementing fault-tolerant infrastructure for a big web-hosting company, generating printed product-catalogs from historical information (“time-travel”) managed by my database, embedded programming for controlling/monitoring antennas/sensors, big data processing for engineering/physics problems, managing a team writing medical software respecting FDA regulations for a MRI machine and more.

In autumn of 2019 I started to use the Rust programming language professionally for work and fell even more in love with it 😊. Rust’s compiler gives very helpful error messages. The programming language has a powerful type system which together with the move semantics allow writing APIs that are hard to mis-use. Another benefit is the type state pattern which avoids the creation of invalid states at compile time, taking away yet another group of common errors. It enables us to colaborate writing solid software that actually works when it compiles. Besides that the Rust ecosystem is amazing, just to name a few: WASM is a first class citizen, documentation generated from comments, allows to put test code in comments, ease of using other libraries, amazingly helpful compiler warnings/errors, rustfmt formatting your code and clippy a tool that points out how to make your source code more idiomatic rust. These and more made me find the love for programming again, because it allows me to focus on the problem I want to solve, instead of having to constantly also think about potential pitfalls the other languages compilers/run-times do not catch.

As a hobby I run my own DNS, mail, web, VPN, GitLab and file-servers complete with off-site backup synchronisation - continually improving those services since the year 2001. I mainly use Linux distributions or FreeBSD on servers and macOS as my client machine. Windows I know quite a bit too, because I used quite often for work.