About me

I studied mechanical engineering at the KIT in Karlsruhe and worked for 5 years for a utility company, on the acquisition of energy market intelligence, analysis of domestic energy demand, and micro co-generation systems. I increasingly got interested in data infrastructure; specifically for geospatial data. This prompted me to pursue a Ph.D. in environmental sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I wrote my dissertation, titled “Towards the Twilight of File-Centricity”. During my Ph.D., I developed the OCCUR, wrote (python and pandas) interfaces for the STARE, and worked on improving the accuracy of fractional snow cover estimates from multispectral remote sensing data (IGARSS/poster).

I spend some time working as a lecturer for UCSB, teaching Geographical Information Systems (GIS) for the Masters of Environmental Science and Management at the Bren School, as well as a two-part introductory course on Data Science, based on UC Berkeley’s Data 8: Foundations of Data Science course. I am also a scientific programmer for Bayesics LLC (the company developing STARE), working on cyberinfrastructure for geospatial data, and assist Natural Capital Consulting in moving their geospatial analysis to the cloud.

Currently, I am a scientist at Leidos working on snow and mobility.

Besides those professional endeavors, my personal interests and thus the posts on this page are somewhat loosely connected to the following topics.

Geospatial Data Engineering

I seem to have made it through a 6 years Ph.D. program with a Geographer as my advisor while refusing to understand map projections. SphereGIS is my attempt to explain spherical geospatial coincidence tests to myself; some of whose routines are used in STARE.

I wrote some recipes to:

A recipe to set up a geoserver; specifically on a production/off-premise machine, such as a AWS/GCC VPS.
An guide to prepare and serve COGs from cloud object stores via geoserver to ArcOnline
A recipe to create a jupyter conda kernel for geospatial stuff to be used in a jupyterhub.
Considerations and a recipe to set up a (cheap) PostGIS server
A recipe to load OSM PGFs (e.g. from geofabrik or planet.openstreetmap.org) to PostGIS

There are also some repositories to

Scavenging

I really hate waste and truly believe that nothing is ever really broken. Fixing things and getting a second life out of stuff gives me a huge kick. This e.g. lead me to convert a 8 USD thrift-store home wifi-router to a eduroam wifi bridge, to re-stock an old NAS, and build a scrap server to host OSM planet], repair some active speakers.

Energy and efficiency

This might tie back into my dislike for waste, but domestic energy consumption and efficiency certainly fascinates me.

Some notes on my guerilla PV system
A repository to download the hourly energy usage data from the SCE website
A collection of scripts to download public energy market data from European Energy Exchange

Random

I build this website with astro. Here is the repository of this website
Repository to linux drivers to a red button gadget
An attempt to estimate how many people are at sea
A script to generate bullshit-bingo fields for corporate meetings
Brute-force generating a boggle/ruzzle field
Extract subtitles from mp4 and mkv
Download SMS via ADB

Dissertation

I wrote my dissertation in markdown, converted it via pandoc to latex and compiled the latex via xelatex to pdf. Here is the repository to the build system I used to compile my dissertation.
The OPeNDAP Citation Creator