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About Me

8 April, 2006 - 01:10 — armin

Hi and welcome,

I am a technology enthusiast. I collect masses of information about software development techniques in the hope to discover new and faster ways to create usable software applications.

I am also a software developer and producer. I build commercial software products that are supposed to solve end user problems.

Right now I am working at the following projects:

  • SharedSafe, which is currently in public beta, is a secure file sharing tool, that tightly integrates into the operating system and utilizes already available, free online storage.
  • “BrainSharper”: (unreleased), a concept mapping application with a zooming UI and an infinite canvas. A year ago I’ve written a prototype in Silverlight.
  • An Aculab hardware based routing server software that is used to route millions of telephone calls.

My first commercial product was Oktalyzer, a music editor that was developed for the Amiga home computer. Oktalyzer was released in 1988. Since then I was part in the creation of a number of software products. For example I enjoyed being part of the team that built CloneDVD for Elaborate Bytes.

One of the most complex projects I have worked at, was an HDDVD interactivity engine (an incremental XSL layouter with SMIL animation support), which I built together with a great team at Nero AG. The resulting core engine was a small (~500 lines) change notification framework with automatic dependency tracking. Since then I got very interested in self-adjusting computation and I think that there is a huge potential for use in visualization systems.

Additionally, I am interested in the following areas:

  • Zooming and multi touch user interfaces
  • Graphical programming languages
  • Document organization
  • Information visualization
  • Change propagation systems, Self-Adjusting Compuation
  • Usability for developers, i.e. aiming to create “intuitive” APIs
  • Programming language concepts, i.e. higher order functions, continuations
  • Workflow modeling
  • Internal and graphical DSLs
  • NoSQL databases, database scalability, storage algorithms and map/reduce integration.

Though I am not the youngest fellow anymore and I never considered myself a “true geek”, I am trying hard to create a platform that supports the productive creativity of people, especially in times where every other application is focused for consumption only.

I also collect quotes which reflect the geek, scientific and programming culture, my personal favorites are:

  • If men believe a situation to be real, it is real in its consequences. – William Thomas
  • Everything you own ends up owning you. – Fight Club

And besides reading news on the Internet and typing incoherent code into the Visual Studio IDE, I like to do the following:

  • Reading books, preferable science fiction, popular physics, and recently, biology and history.
  • Running (mostly in spring and autumn)
  • Hiking on small islands for example Mallorca, Gran Canaria, Teneriffe.
  • Hollywood movies, honestly, I like special effects and I am an iTunes addict.
  • TV shows (for example: Lost, FlashForward, Fringe, Futurama, The Event, Southpark and The Big Bang Theory)
  • Playing PC and PS3 games. Regularly, I play Trackmania. I am not so bad at the “tech” and “rpg” discipline.

I don’t like constructed values with no actual foundation of proof or reproducibility, for example astrology or religious beliefs.

God was invented to explain mystery. — Richard Feynman

For me it is a natural consequence of reasoning that religion is constructed. and merely of cultural value.

I think that most memes that are distributed by media or society are overrated and distracting, including cultural inherited values. Nearly everything seems to be created to avoid the inevitable confrontation with uncertainty, fear and death. Sadly, instead of calming people down, these constructs mostly produce the inverse effects, often by shifting morality. I see layers and layers of distraction, which form an environment that causes permanent cognitive dissonance for the individual.

And I suspect that there is a built in (evolutionary intended?) flaw in our cognitive system (self?), so that actual truth or value can not be maintained (stabilized or collapsed), resulting in a world where change is the only stable thing you will ever experience.

If you want to connect, follow me on Twitter, subscribe to my RSS feed or ask me anything.