About Me

Hello! I’m Steffen, a R&D Software Engineer by day and open-source enthusiast, hacker and tinkerer by night.

First some short facts about me:

👶🏻 I was born in Baden, Switzerland and grew up in Darmstadt, Germany.
🎓 I hold a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology from RWTH Aachen University.
💼 Since 2023, I am working as R&D Software Engineer at OPAL-RT Germany.
⛵ Together with my wife, I now live in the beautiful region of Eifel, close to Aachen in Germany.
🔭 In my spare time, I work on cunīcu, a peer-to-peer overlay network.
🚴🏻 Or I spend the time outside, hiking, cycling or running.
🌱 I am also learning Rust and Astro.
👯 I am looking to collaborate on open-source networking projects written in Go and Rust.

Biography

In 1990, I was born in Baden, Switzerland 🇨🇭 and grew up from 1992 in the Rhine-Main region of southern Germany 🇩🇪. After finishing school years in Darmstadt, I moved to Cologne for my voluntary ecological year in 2009. A year later, I started my studies at RWTH Aachen University, where I graduated with a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology in 2017. Followed by a industry internship at OPAL-RT in Montreal, Canada, I started my research career at RWTH Aachen University in May 2017. Until 2022, I have continued to work in Aachen as a research associate pursuing my PhD in distributed real-time simulation 🎓. During this time I have received to opportunity to collaborate and visit with several renowned research institutions across Europe and the US. Since 2023, I am working as R&D Software Engineer at OPAL-RT Germany. I have now left Aachen to live in the beautiful Eifel region in western Germany, where I live with my wife in a small village close to the Belgian border.

I am passionate about open-source software, real-time simulation, embedded systems, low-level programming, networking and distributed systems. In my spare time, I write and contribute to various open-source projects.

I operate my own Homelab and Autonomous System (AS) to experiment with BGP, routing and network engineering .

My online avatar.

Most of my daily services like email, code repositories, file and backup services are self-hosted on my own hardware. This allows me to stay independent from big tech companies #UnplugTrump, and stay in control of my social media presence.

When I’m not working on software projects, you can find me hiking in the mountains 🏔️, cycling with my Gravel bike 🚴🏻, or experimenting with electronics and hardware hacking 👾. I enjoy traveling and exploring new cultures whenever I get the chance ✈️. My past adventures have taken me to places like South America, Patagonia 🇨🇱, Norway 🇳🇴, Iceland 🇮🇸, Japan 🇯🇵 and Mongolia 🇲🇳.

Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality

Dalai Lama XIV