I'm a software guy with a PhD in computer science (dnb, upress, Amazon). When I'm not looking at a screen, I love my family, hiking, our garden, hacking, and finding ways to work around cloud coercion for things that should not be exposed to the net (basically everything, but in particular privacy-friendly smart home solutions).

Back in the 1990s, a friend and I operated a ''Bulletin Board System'' (EXCESS BBS, NetzProjekt Weingarten) and a local FidoNet hub. Around that time, the Internet started gaining traction with the wider public. npw.net in its current form as a communications service was born in 1997. Looking back, those were wild times.

Between 1999 and 2010, I was deeply involved in the RoboCup community. It all started at the University of Ulm as a team member of "The Ulm Sparrows". In 2005, a friend and I founded the Carpe Noctem (Cassel) team at the University of Kassel. This pushed the research focus of our distributed systems group a big step towards autonomous robotics. In 2009, after submitting my thesis, I relocated further north to join the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Bremen. Our students took over and successfully continued the journey until around 2018.

In 2012, I transitioned from academia to the medical device industry by joining GE HealthCare. Here, I take care of DevSecOps — ranging from IT infrastructure to automated product vulnerability management, all the way to classic software development and software architecture. Back to the roots, basically.

Today, I build and maintain software for Linux and Windows. On a daily basis, I work with C++, Python, Groovy, Bash, and PowerShell. I also feel right at home with C, C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, Rust, and similar languages.

Professionally, almost everything revolves around build and test automation (mainly Jenkins), IT security and data privacy (applied cryptography, privacy/security requirements engineering, static and dynamic application security testing, vulnerability scanning), Software Bill of Materials (SBOM), distributed software architectures, virtualization and containers (KVM, LXC, containerd/Docker/Podman) in the Linux ecosystem, maintaining Proxmox/Ceph clusters, and provisioning local Large Language Model instances (mainly via ollama).

Previously, I was a Research Group Leader at the DFKI GmbH (Robotics Innovation Center Bremen), a Project Leader at DFKI and REC GmbH, and was responsible for acquiring public-funded research projects (BMBF, BMWi, BMVBS, DFG, EU) at DFKI. I also served as Chair of RoboCup tournaments (GO MSL 2008/2009), and was a founder, team lead, and member of the RoboCup Middle-Size League Team Carpe Noctem.

Specialties: DevSecOps, professional hacking & coding, distributed systems, build automation, security, network setup/administration, virtualization (Proxmox, KVM, Xen, ESXi), mobile & cooperative robotics.