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Hi! I’m Nicolas, a computer scientist and software engineer from Germany. The topics I’m nerding out about change on a daily basis, but some of my main interests are programming languages, type systems, urbanism and hiking.
Where to find me
There are a lot of places where you can find me online, some of which I’ve listed here.
- ⁂ Fediverse / Mastodon: @eisfunke@inductive.space
- My GitLab Instance: @eisfunke
- GitHub: @Eisfunke
Contact
If you want to contact me directly, try one of these channels. I speak German, English and some Dutch. My preferred pronoun is “he”, but you can also use “they”.
- Matrix messenger: @eisfunke:eisfunke.com (preferred)
- Email: graphic with address, audio recording with address
- Signal messenger: eisfunke.42
Links
- If you’re interested in hiring me, take a look at my work page.
- I maintain a public collection of notes as a personal knowledge base.
- I publish my salary data on my salary transparency page.
About Me
I’m 29 and live in Germany. I grew up in the Bergisches Land, went to University and still feel quite at home in the Ruhrpott, and now live in scenic Rheinhessen.
I’m a computer scientist working as a software engineer at Rhein-Ruhr Systemtechnik, where I work with railway technology of all kinds, especially signalling.
I love learning, teaching and trying out new things! The topics I’m nerding out about change on a daily basis. My most persistent interests center around computer science, but I enjoy a lot of other stuff as well.
I document some of my interests and projects as blog posts on this site, on Mastodon / the Fediverse, in my public note collection (Zettelkasten) or upload them on my GitLab.
Computer Science, Software & Tech
My interests in computer science center on functional programming, programming languages, their theory and design, type theory and formal verification.
I enjoy the less theoretical parts of the craft as well, e.g. I like working with computing and networking infrastructure, especially with Nix and NixOS. I self-host this website and a bunch of web services.
I’m an advocate for (LLM-slop-)free software and a more human and social tech industry. Although I love my field, with the current direction of this industry, I dream of one day leaving the tech world and opening a little ice cream parlor, café, or maybe a pub…
Other Interests
Some of my non-computer-science-y interests include:
- making, sewing, 3d printing
- ink, fountain pens, calligraphy
- ice cream making, food (take a look at my recipe collection)
- coffee, beer, wine
- trains, railways, railway signaling
- city infrastructure, urbanism, transit
- hiking, cycling
- podcasts, fantasy, sci-fi
- media, sociology, history
- computer games
Tip Me
If you found one of my posts, podcast episodes, free software projects, web services or anything else to be helpful and want to say thanks, you can buy me a coffee over at my Ko-fi page. I appreciate it!
Meta
Header Image
The header background image on the top of this page is a photo I took myself. It shows the Jungfrau mountain in Switzerland. The point of view is Wengen. The Bernese Oberland, where those are located, is probably the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to. This photo reminds me of when we visited there.
Licensing
Unless marked otherwise, the content and source code of
this blog are licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
The Eisfunke logo in the header is subject to some usage terms, see the link.
The fonts used are Raleway as main sans serif font, Zilla Slab as Slab Serif font for continuous text and Iosevka in a custom variant as monospace code font.
Tech
This blog is built with Nebelhorn, a static site generator based on Pandoc. I wrote Nebelhorn myself in Haskell, because of course I have.
I write the pages and posts in Markdown in a Git repository on my GitLab. A CI pipeline then builds and deploys the site using Nix and GitLab Pages.