My work so far allowed me to familiarize myself with a variety of diverse technologies and methods. I was lucky to work on projects that encompassed the entire spectrum from interfacing with kernel APIs at the bottom layer to designing user-facing visualization and interaction at the top.
Since 2019 Rust is gradually replacing C++ as my main working language and as of 2022 I consider myself primarily Rust developer.
I also had extensive professional opportunities to pursue my passion for automating my environment and acquired a preference for reliability and comprehensibility of software design in the process.

Since 2005 I have been using Linux exclusively on all my laptops, desktops, routers, and Raspberry Pis. I have been involved in maintaining a custom Linux distribution as part of my regular job at Intra2net AG since 2014. The distributions with whose administration I am familiar include NixOS which I contribute to occasionally, Arch, Maemo, OpenWRT, Debian (this server), and Fedora (work).

I have contributed to a number of free software / open source projects both professionally and outside work. A number of my personal projects received their own brief section on this site. Some further projects I’ve contributed to are the Linux kernel, Samba, tig, nixpkgs, LuaTEX, a TEX engine written in C, as well the LaTEX and ConTEXt formats (TEX and Lua in harmonic coexistence).
Since 2014 I am also maintaining a fully automated Git repository and mirror for the ConTEXt project to compensate for the lack of upstream use of source control.

As a historian, my primary area of interest used to be medieval History of Russia, Lithuania, and Poland. In addition, I have a deep passion for the history of science, which is probably the topic I have read most about outside the professional context. On the practical side I like working with sources directly – translation, textual criticism etc. – and aim for improving the craft of historiography through digital methods.

While at university I first studied History of Eastern Europe and Philosophy only. After taking the obligatory Latin course in the first two semesters, which was a fascinating experience, I took on Latin as a minor subject as well. Initially I kept Philosophy as major but after I had the opportunity to take a course on medieval Novgorod in 2010, I switched it for History. In the end I graduated with a Magister (roughly equivalent to an MA) thesis on 15th century Lithuania and Muscovy.

I had the pleasure to stay abroad in Czech Republic twice: Thanks to the Erasmus program I studied Latin at the Department of Classical Studies in Brno for the fall semester of 2007. Only half a year later I was awarded a full-year stipend by the German-Czech Future Fund and chose to study history in the City of Olomouc.

At any time during my university years I was learning at least one language, be it natural or artificial. To save brain space I prefer languages with grammatical rules of high generality; properties like strong inflection and predictable accents make Latin and West Slavic languages very attractive.
Since 2015 I am actively learning French, albeit primarily in an informal manner: the vocabulary acquired so far may be biased towards different kinds of cheese.

Native language: German. Proficiency and routine in English (TOEFL score 112 in 2018). (Don’t bother asking me for further certificates unless you are willing to pay for the certification.)

Other languages that I have a working proficiency in with but which are less trivial to rate: Varieties of Old German: historical dialects of High and Low German as used in Livonia, in Prussia, and by the Hansa. Historical Slavic languages: Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, Ruthenian (i. e. the official language of the chancellery of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania; Old Belarusian/Ukrainian etc.), early modern Polish.

My passion for books manifests extends to the craft of making them – typesetting and typography. My tool of choice for realizing high typographical demands is TEX. A long-time LaTEX user, I was made aware of ConTEXt at the Heidelberg TEX Stammtisch in late 2009 and it has quickly become my main format. Lately I have begun investigating into Knuth’s Plain format because it imposes less restrictions on layout manipulation, which is required for parallel typesetting (text streams as is common in e. g. multi-language documents).