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Hi! I’m Nicolas. I’m a computer science student in Germany. My main interests are functional programming, type systems, free software and infrastructure – both in computing and in cities.

You can find out more about me below. If you’re here for my blog posts and projects, check out my blog posts. And if you’re interested in hiring me, do take a look here!

Where to find me

There are a lot of places where you can find me online, some of which I’ve listed here.

Contact

If you want to contact me directly, try one of these channels. I speak German, English and some Dutch. My pronoun is “he”.

About Me

Personal

I’m 26 and live in Dortmund, Germany, where I’m a student of computer science at TU Dortmund University. I work as a working student in software engineering and railroad technology at Rhein-Ruhr Systemtechnik.

Computer Science, Software & Tech

I love computer science, learning & teaching. My focus is on functional programming, programming languages, their theory and design, type theory and formal verification.

On the more practical side I’m a fan and an advocate for Linux and free software in general. I enjoy working with computing and networking infrastructure, especially with Nix and NixOS. In line with that, I self-host this website and a bunch of services with it, and I help administrate the web services provided by the computer science student body at my university.

I do a variety of projects in my free time centering around software, tech, computer science and sometimes other areas. Some of which I document as blog posts on this site or upload free and open-source on my GitLab.

Other Interests

I’m also interested in city infrastructure, urbanism, cycling and transit. And by the way, I was already planning to move to the Netherlands before it was cool and before I started watching Not Just Bikes!

To get my head off of tech and politics, I enjoy hiking, sewing, podcasts and books. With my friend Jonas I do a German-speaking mostly-weekly opinion podcast about politics, infrastructure and tech named Das System ist das Problem. Oh, and I like coffee.

Those are my main, permanent interests. I love learning and trying new things from all kinds of areas. But as we all know, the day has only 24 hours, so I’m trying to focus most of my time on doing a few keys things, but do those properly.

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

CC-BY-SA-4.0 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.