The short version
I run Linux infrastructure for a living and take consumer hardware apart for fun. By day that is fleet management, virtualisation, containers, and evaluating open-source software before anyone else has to find out whether it holds up. Off the clock: Godot, gamejams, and a Raspberry Pi or an old Altera FPGA that is probably still running.
The day job
System administrator at Silicon Austria Labs. The honest summary is that the job never really switches off.
- Fleet management across VMware, Proxmox and Xen/QEMU
- Linux, heavily — 30 years of Linux servers, mostly AlmaLinux and Alpine
- Containers with Docker and Podman, and the automation around them
- Python for everything that would otherwise be a shell script held together with hope
- Open-source evaluation — trying the next thing before it reaches production
- AI research and development, lately: local inference and evaluation with
llama.cpp, and working out where agents actually earn their keep versus where they are a liability in a trench coat
The other thing
Fifteen years of taking things apart to see what is inside.
Raspberry Pis, Orange Pis, Arduinos, a Tuya camera that did not stay in Tuya’s cloud, an Anyka pan-tilt-zoom module, and an old Altera FPGA from eBay that I wrote VHDL and Verilog for. The recurring theme is reverse engineering: disassemble, work out what it is doing, and get it under some kind of control.
To be straight about it: I have never designed a board or a chip from scratch. Everything I have built sits on top of other people’s silicon and other people’s datasheets. VHDL and Verilog on a secondhand Altera board is not chip design, and I would rather say so than let the character sheet imply otherwise.
Open source
Testing open-source software is part of the job, and contributing back is the part I care about. Thirty-four of my own repositories, most of them small and specific — an IP discovery registry for Docker environments, a Godot face tracker for VTubing, a PTZ daemon, a CI action for exporting Godot projects. Thirty-nine more are forks of things I use or have opinions about.
Previously: anime fansubbing and translation work, including team lead and translation provider duties for various open-source projects. A decade of Godot and weekly gamejams. A stretch as a personal assistant for people who needed one, in a healthcare setting. All of it parked for lack of time, which is the recurring theme of this paragraph as well.
Languages
German, natively. English, fluently. Japanese, slowly.
This site
Built with Hugo, hosted on GitHub Pages, no tracking and no database. The front page is an RPG character sheet because apparently I could not help myself, and the achievements are graded on the same scale.
Posts are tagged, so you can read just the parts you care about:
#electrical— hardware, EMC, debugging#godot-dev— GDScript, game dev#rpg— tabletop, worldbuilding#webdev— this site and other code#rant— the ones I probably shouldn’t publish
Everything else worth knowing is on the character sheet — including the honest part about soldering.