About

Hi there,

… you have stumbled upon the technically least interesting section of this blog and are currently reading my somewhat flawed and most definitely far too long attempt at describing myself. As I do not wish to bore any of my dear readers more than strictly necessary I will give you the TL/DR right at the start:

I am a reasonably decent human being with a specific skill set and passion I love to share. And you can hire me

If you are interested in more details, please read on. You have been warned, it will be long and full of terrors.

I am a software engineer, programmer and educator resident in Berlin, where I studied and taught computer science for several years.

My passion for programming was ignited about two decades ago when I discovered books about game programming with BlitzBasic in a local library. Since then I have become well versed in many languages, but kind of specialized in C++.
This language has been particularly influential in my personal and professional development and I take some pride in my understanding of it. As such I actively follow all new developments, like experimenting with new features, go to every conference I can get to and watch recordings of those I cannot attend. For several years I have been volunteering as part of the organizing team of Meeting C++, which is a really awesome conference you should all support.

Besides programming myself, I also love to share my enthusiasm and educate people, which I did both privately and at Humboldt University, where I was employed for almost 7 years and involved in teaching pretty much any compulsory computer science course for undergrads and some additional ones about C++ programming.

Another thing I am quite interested in is game design, which I believe shares many qualities with teaching.
Because of this intersection and my interest in it I decided - during my time at school - to join the game design group at my local university, with which I developed - as their sole programmer - some educational games for a local museum

I especially enjoy developing games for retro hardware, which I admire not just for nostalgia, but its comparative simplicity. The often quite resource constrained hardware combined with the notoriously demanding nature of video games make for a nice challenge and are a good way to practice writing efficient code.
That fascination is part of if not the prime motivation for my year long involvement in homebrew game development, releasing several small games for Sega’s Dreamcast and various open handheld systems like the Pandora or Gp2x Wiz. Furthermore, one of my current little side projects is a Gameboy emulator, which I hope to document on this blog.

I also very occasionally like to do some sort of competitive coding for recreational purposes. I have accounts at codingame, at codewars and regularly participate in adventofcode. I elaborated on my feelings a little in this post

Further removed from my work, I practice kendo and love the game of chess in all its various incarnations. I’m not really any good, but you can play me on chess.com or lichess.org if you are so inclined. Since I am so bad I wrote an engine that is better, which will be detailed on here soon.

I love to get into elaborate, far too deep and often prolonged discussions about matters of paramount importance to our progress as a species like for instance the ethical implications of AI, morals in politics and fictional characters. I am not at all opinionated, which is a lie.

I have been meaning to create a blog and fill it with content for several years now. If you happen to be interested in even more details as to what finally convinced me to jump over my own shadow and actually do it, you are in luck. I was self-indulgent and self-interested enough to record my musing on that topic and wrote a complete article about it, too. Enjoy!

I do love the idea of open source, but am really quite shy, which is why you will find only very little of my work online. That is a situation I intend to rectify in conjunction with this blog.

I am available for software development, code review and training/teaching. If you are interested in my skills and services, just send me a mail and we can work out the details.
If you prefer an intermediary, my services are additionally offered on fiverr, freelancer.com and upwork.
I’m also open to longer term commitments if the cause is something I can support and believe in.