✌️ I’m Chris and I like to build stuff.
For my Bachelor’s and Master’s, I studied Cognitive Science in Osnabrück with a focus on machine learning and language processing. It’s crazy how when I started my studies, Neural Networks were not even on the schedule and us students had to start the first course about them to get the ball rolling - by now there are 3 professorships regarding that. Even though I am not sure how much I’ll do in the future that has to do with any of the contents of my studies, I loved every bit of it, and took every chance I got to learn more, taking up to 60 credits per semester. It’s really great that in this course of study, besides the basic ones we could take a huge set of courses to fill our transcript, and I used that chance to, among many others, also do two thirds of a Computer Science degree on the side and followed whatever sounded interesting.
Very quickly I moved from just attending courses to helping shape them. I worked as a tutor 4 times, had several research assistant jobs, and became active in the study commission and the examination board. Since it came up in the study commission, that a research-focused programming course in english was missing in our study programme, I took the chance to offer it myself. Me and a friend thus started teaching the course Scientific Programming in Python, and I also took over for two more years with the course - the last of which online due to COVID-19. The course was very well attended, liked and is still being taught in pretty much the same way as we did back then. Throughout the years, I was also very active in our student council, and eventually also became elected as chair. As part of that, I organized many events for our very active student body, among others I took main responsibility five times for organising our annual study trip to Lohra, which became a larger and larger event throughout the years. Uni for me was always more than just lectures; it was a place to build things with and for other people.
While I was still studying, I started working in two startups as a developer and data scientist. First at inserve, where I mostly did data science and machine learning, and then for several years at VisioLab as one of their first developers. That was a great position because I could move across the stack: backend and fullstack work, DevOps, data engineering and ML. I helped take the whole system from “a script runs once a day in Google Colab” to a proper, production-ready setup with microservices on Kubernetes in Google Cloud, infrastructure as code and a focus on reliability and scalability, allowing me to really learn a lot there.
At some point I also tried science more seriously and started a PhD project on Large Language Models for (research) software engineering. I am still glad I dug deep into that world – teenage me set as life goal to build something like JARVIS, and working with LLMs showed me that well, humanity is basically already there. But especially at a job in academia, a field which I love and enjoy, I also realised that I am not the person who wants to sit in an office all day and only look at code on a screen, no matter how smart that code is. I am just not the “psht, he’s a coder, best to leave him alone, he needs to sit in front of his screen all day” kind of person, even though I am good at it and will always spend a huge chunk of my free time coding as well.
As a person, I identify myself to a large degree through the things I build, and I feel most comfortable on the edge between digital and physical. I bought a 3D printer, started filling boxes with microcontrollers, sensors and LEDs and noticed how much more I enjoy when a project ends with something you can touch, push, turn on and break (and then fix). I am happiest when my code directly drives something in the real world - be it Motors, lights, sensors, screens, sound. I love to work with Microcontrollers such as the ESP32 and Raspberry Pi, I design 3D-printed parts and enclosures, and wire up sensors, LEDs and small mechanisms so they survive more than one evening on a festival or in an installation. I still enjoy the thinking and theory from my Cognitive Science and ML background, but what really motivates me now are interactive prototypes, museum-like exhibits and playful installations where people can press buttons, try things out, fail safely, laugh and learn something along the way. I care about third spaces, which are less about consumption, and more about shared time, learning and a bit of wonder. I like building prototypes and interactive worlds that feel playful on the surface, but are technically robust and maintainable behind the scenes.
A lot of that played out in the last years at festivals - a natural progression for me after organizing a lot of my own parties and events for people to experience something together. At Zugvögel Festival I helped build our lovely little floor with around fifteen people - from woodwork to decoration to light control. Also, for the last three years, I have been part of the Wanderzirkus collective, where I was at Moyn, and so far three times several weeks on the Palapa Floor at Fusion Festival. There, I am part of the Light and Tech Crew, spending a lot of time on turning a lot of “dumb” lamps such as street lights, traffic lights or whatever we can get our hands on, into a professional stage ligthing system appropriate for the largest stage on one of Europe’s largest festivals. At both of these festivals, I also brought my own installations, and my personal pet project on Fusion is a fully interactive Spaceship.
If you want a structured, more traditional overview of my background, have a look at my interactive CV, which is generated here with adjustable level of detail. For concrete examples, feel free to just click through the projects. If you want to contact me personally, have a look here.
Peace✌️