Black Snow

about

Senior full-stack Engineer / Software Architect (FSE/DevSecOps)
Junior Machine Learning Engineer (MLE/MLOps)
M.Sc. Computer Science
INTJ-A (Architect)
Mom, I do computers

– optimize for learning –

(Yes, I like to be some kind of a Jack of all trades. Not a „master of none“ – I master general problem solving ;))

I started programming at 14, I think, and started working as a software engineer right before starting my CS studies. I learned a lot about actual real world problems by solving actual real world problems. Now, many problems businesses are facing (over and over again) have more and more become solved problems – somewhat boring routine work. Although the field is in constant metamorphosis, machine learning has always been my secret love and the still rather recent second spring for the field was a good opportunity to invest myself into it. My first thesis was about tackling an NLP task (domain-specific classification, custom collected training data in uncharted terrain) and my second thesis was about applying a recent (as in 2020-ish) self-supervised technique (CPC) to a new domain (graphs). Both were a ton of fun and very successful.

What I love most about my job or area of work is that I can keep on learning forever. You just never know enough. You can always do better, rethink, rework. If you struggle now, keep pushing, teach yourself, come back later. And, arguably, the second best thing is that there is so much free stuff and knowledge sharing. People build things just because they can, because they think it might be useful, they help on another just for fun – now ain’t this beautiful?

active projects:

old projects:

  • Verbrechen – Gathers news reports on crimes from all kinds of sources, aggregates, transforms and classifies them, finally delivering them to the customers in a mobile app. Lots of interesting things about this from hard problems in gathering, classifying and extracting information to presentation on the other end. Among other things, I created the original Android app as well as parts of the backend and the ML-powered classification.
  • PhotoSync – Automatically back up and encrypt your pictures to various cloud providers and sync them across devices. I created the original android app and an electron-based cross-platform desktop app.
  • Infinisee – That’s basically PhotoSync with a different name.
  • MusicAround – A spin-off of Verbrechen for music-related events taking place around you.
  • Fleischerei Lindow – Local butchery website; interesting bits are: design, UX, page speed and sorts, legal stuff, business-side UX, mailings and internal business tools for things like price tags or BI, SEO, ads, gmaps, newsletter & GDPR compliance, … (discontinued)

Black Snow (music) – currently no official material (‚cept the stuff from the music page). Time is scarce and sadly music is the love that’s suffering the most.

Feel free to contact me! I speak German, English and Swedish :)

A growing list of tools, techs, patterns, frameworks, etc. I’ve used so far – order does not imply recency or importance and it’s by no means complete:

PHP, JavaScript, SQL, Java, Hadoop, Apache webserver, Jupyter, Python, Pandas, PIL, PyTorch, Keras, Spring Boot, jUnit, k8s, GCP, IntelliJ, Docker, Laravel, Anaconda, PostgreSQL, JSON5, JSON-LD, JSON-Schema, DBeaver, Spreadsheets, REST, MS Teams, nginx, VMware, Visual Studio, Atom, Sublime Text, Virtual Box, Maven, Gradle, Composer, NPM, Svelte, Zotero, WSL, Cuda, Git, GitHub, GitLab, SVN, CVS, LaTeX, Gatling, jMeter, Kali, Metasploit, Firefox, Solidity, Ruby (on Rails), Active Admin, HTML, CSS, SASS, Electron, SOAP, AWS EC2, Google Cloud Run, Google App Engine, GCS, Google Tag Manager, Google Ads, Cookiebot, Asana, Redmine, Chat-Ops, Dialogflow, sklearn, Scala, Groovy, Haskell, Android, Trello, Draw.io, Paint.net, Elasticsearch, Redis, Swagger / OpenApi OAS, JSON, Insomnia, Terraform, Dagger, AWS, EDA, AsyncAPI, VSC, Gherkin, Confluence/Jira, KEDA, argoCD, argo workflows, Azure services, FastAPI, Go, rabbitMQ, eventstore DB, HubSpot, Sentry, Mixpanel, buildpacks, testcontainers, CloudEvents, AsyncAPI, Kyverno, Helm, dependency-track, k9s, k6

Some quotes (more or less) I like and live:

  • Stop starting, start finishing.
  • Outexperiment the competition.
  • Optimize for learning. / Learning requires inefficiency.
  • Love your customer, not your product.