Software engineering is a profession, and it is an art.

I like the art of system design and coding. I respect complexity, I love to simplify.

I have a keen interest for the magic behind the scenes: fault tolerance, network technology, scalable and distributed systems.

As a scientist by heart and education, I love data and have things to say and thoughts about numerical data analysis, statistics, and machine learning.

At the core of software engineering, I like to focus on defining what correct behavior is, on creating clear concepts, on code readability and quality, on testing, and on maintainability. Balanced against business needs: I love to ship it, to get feedback.

I believe that long-term maintenance of software with a large user base teaches many important lessons.

I constantly learn and like to discover new things!

Resources:

• Stack Overflow Careers profile.
• profiles at Bitbucket, GitHub, Stack Overflow.

Open source software projects that I created and maintain:

• gipc, providing gevent-cooperative child processes and inter-process communication. Used by Quantopian, Ajenti, Chronology, GDriveFS and others.
• WP-GeSHi-Highlight, a syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress, used by more than 1.000 websites.
• python-cmdline-bootstrap, a structure template for Python command line applications, simplifying release and distribution via setuptools/PyPI/pip for Python 2 and 3.
• goeffel, a tool for measuring the resource utilization of a specific process over time.

A selection of articles I have published through my blog

• Reading files line by line in C++ using ifstream: dealing correctly with badbit, failbit, eofbit, and perror()
• Distributing a Python command line application
• Sharing state in AngularJS: be aware of $watch issues and race conditions during app initialization
• Discourse Docker container: send mail through Exim
• Building numpy and scipy with Intel compilers and Intel MKL on a 64 bit machine
• JavaScript in a browser: create a binary blob from a base64-encoded string, and decode it using UTF-8
• A command line argument is raw binary data. It comes with limitations and needs interpretation
• Data analysis with pandas: enjoy the awesome
• In-memory SQLite database and Flask: a threading trap
• Setting up Torque (PBS) for GPU job scheduling
• Recover a gzipped HTML response from the browser cache

Much more to be found in the technology category of my blog.

Web services that I created and maintain:

• Songkick events for Google’s Knowledge Graph, extracts tour dates for a certain artist from Songkick and converts the data to a special JSON-LD format, applicable for showing events in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Used by Milky Chance, The Black Feathers and others.

Open source software projects that I have contributed to:

• gevent, a coroutine-based network library
• pandas, a data analysis and manipulation library for Python
• Radicale, a CalDAV/CardDAV server
• ldap3, a Python LDAP library
• gunicorn, a Python WSGI (HTTP) Server
• Falcon, a Python web framework
• pysaml2, a Python SAML library
• python3-saml, another Python SAML library
• DC/OS
• docker-openldap, a docker image to run OpenLDAP
• docker-library/buildpack-deps
• FreeNAS
• matplotlib
• IPython
• POV-Ray
• AmberTools
• boto
• Discourse
• WordPress
• LuaTeX
• Python
• Mixxx
• Inkscape
• SciPy/NumPy
• Twitter Bootstrap
• CernVM
• Open Babel
• Galleria
• geopy
• PyWin32
• Mudlet
• OpenTelemac

and others.

Stale/idle software projects that I have created:

• timegaps, a command line program for thinning out a collection of items, whereas the “time gaps” between accepted items become larger with increasing age of items. Useful for implementing backup retention policies.
• molecular-structure-comparison, a Python framework for analyzing molecular structures, featuring, for instance, a DBSCAN clustering method with automatic parameter optimization, and a simple PDB file format parser.
• beautiful-readme, creating a mobile-friendly static website from your README file.
• clobi, a job scheduling system supporting virtual machines in multiple Infrastructure-as-a-Service computing clouds, developed in the course of my Google Summer of Code 2009.
• AWSAC, Amazon Web Services for ATLAS Computing.
• Fotobatch, for renaming, resizing, and turning many digital photos with only one click.
• Keks, a highly decoupled micro job queuing system based on Python, Redis, and gevent.
• Brezel, a Python module for the optimization of JavaScript and CSS in static HTML projects.
• Schlonz, a Python program for building modern static image galleries using cutting-edge HTML5 techniques and some of the best Lightbox and image gallery techniques available.
• latexletter, a Python module that provides a simple abstraction for the creation of LaTeX letters based on template files.
• Galleria Classicmod, a free theme for Galleria, providing, among others, a fullscreen option.