About me

I'm Nils, 30 and the creator of this blog and the web application that serves it.

I did my bachelor degree in computer science at DHBW Karlsruhe. After receiving my degree at the age of 21, I went to KIT and graduated with a master degree in computer science at the age of 23. Next to my studies, I worked at Fraunhofer IOSB as a software developer for almost 5 years.

After university, I joined a crazy insurtech startup called Getsafe as a software engineer in the beautiful city (of my birth) Heidelberg, where I also live since 2018.

I started this blog in my free time to proof to myself that I can build a real application in Ruby, and also to practice writing some more. Software development and building products is my passion, but I also enjoy reading and talking about philosophy, economics, politics and investment. I go running to get my thoughts cleared up, I enjoy listening to rock and ambient music and I drink an unhealthy amount of coffee.

My work and some open source contributions happen on GitHub, I infrequently put out thoughts on twitter and you can connect with me on LinkedIn.

About this blog

This blog runs on a rented Linux VServer in Germany. The core is a rather simple Ruby on Rails (5.2) application with static assets served by nginx, unicorn running the rack app and MySQL as its production database. I write blog posts in Markdown and the application renders them to HTML on the fly. A simple session based login system supports authoring posts. An OAuth based login allows to write comments. The web pages are styled by a custom CSS framework, only relying on normalize.css. All code was written on macOS with TextMate and Terminal.app as the main tools.