About me

This place is a good start to learn more about me. This site is my personal weblog and a way for people to get in touch with me.

# Sports

Since I'm working in the tech business my typical working day does not include any kind of sports – except mental sport. I try to make up for this misery by spending parts of my free time jogging or riding around on my cyclocross bike. I love nature and try to stay away from roads and cities if possible and run through woods and forests and meadows.

# Technology

I do love technology – especially any tech that is related to the internet. I'm fascinated about how human mankind created and maintains a global network where any individual can (theoretically) reach any other individual on this earth in a just a few hundred milliseconds. We believe it's normal but in my opinion it's not. To me it's one of the greatest achievements of mankind!

I have worked in several jobs so far. I would call myself an all-rounder who loves to learn new stuff that is related to technology by any means. Jobs in the past included:

Working as a front-end web developer
Working as a full-stack web developer
Working as a data engineer trainer

The best part about my job is that I love it so much that I also do it privately. I love to operate my own web-server on which I host many tools that I love and use on a daily basis. These include:

Gitea: I host my private git server and I love it!
Elasticsearch: I use Elasticsearch for some side-projects in which I require a full-text based search engine. It's my document store for any kind of (un-/semi-structured) documents that I want to crawl through later. See my posts about Elasticsearch.
Miniflux: My personal RSS reader. While most people consume most of their news through social media channels, which have their recommender systems doing it's (influential) work in the background, I try to stay away from social media and consume hand-picked channels instead. Miniflux is an awesome web-based RSS reader that supports me in this endeavor.
Nextcloud: I love to have control over my data. This is why I don't use public cloud storage but have a self-hosted Nextcloud instance. I'm quite happy with it. Of course it does not offer as much as many public cloud providers offer, but I think it's a good compromise between functionality and privacy. See my posts about Nextcloud.
Organice: Great tool that translated the Emacs org-mode into a web-based interface. I use it to maintain a simple text file where I brain-dump my ideas and organize many aspects of my life. Strictly speaking it would not be necessary to host Organice myself but I like to have control over the version and any (potentially breaking) changes of the tools that I heavily use on a daily basis.
Airflow: The hidden task-scheduler for some automatic tasks on my server. It's a great tool for building and maintaining data processing pipelines.
Pi-hole: Ads and tracking scripts – the web has become an ugly space in some aspects. Pi-hole helps to remove a huge portion of this ugliness and makes the web a friendlier place again – for all devices in my network. Nice. See my posts about Pi-hole.
Nginx: I use Nginx as a reverse proxy for various services on my web-server. It's such a great and reliable piece of software. ♥
Plausible Analytics: I use a self-hosted Plausible Analytics instance to gain a few insights into this blog. I can highly recommend it as an alternative to Google Analytics in case you care about the privacy of your users.

I would like to thank all the developers involved in creating these wonderful tools and sharing them with the public. They are my (silent) heroes.

# Teaching

Part of my professional life has always been to educate colleagues or train/mentor other people along my own learning path. I love to teach because it helps me to understand things better. I use the Feynman technique whenever possible to learn new stuff and can highly recommend it to others.

# Open Source

I am an Open Source advocate. Most of the software that I have privately developed in the past has been released under an Open Source license. I think the world needs to share more ideas, more code and more of the good stuff in order to improve the situation for everybody on this planet. I like to contribute whatever I can.

Unfortunately this is not true for code that I have developed professionally because companies often try to lock their secrets behind their walls. But this may change in the future ...

I'm not really interested in social media. I don't think it does any good if single providers get too large which is why I try to stay away from any of the major players in the social media context. I do make use of Mastodon where you can find me on the Fosstodon instance.

# Computers

Well, I guess I have way too many of them right now. But these are the main devices that I use are currently:

A Macbook Pro which I use as my developer notebook. Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-5287U CPU @ 2.90GHz with 2 cores, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD. I used to use macOS for the notebook, but since Apple is lacking the high-quality support they have had in the past I decided to switch to Manjaro Linux some time ago. And I'm quite happy about this decision, ~~although unfortunately battery life has dropped significantly (but that might also be a coincidence with the battery which seems to be dying)~~^[1]. I prefer Linux over macOS because of the freedom. I would probably not go back to macOS anymore.
A hand-made server which I use to self-host a lot of software (see above). Also runs a Linux operating system (Ubuntu Server). Specs: AMD Ryzen 3 2200G with 4 cores @ 3.50 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 8 TB HDD.