I’m working in a scientific research for over 15 years, and currently you can find me at the neurophysics department of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In general, my research is concerned about the analysis and quantification of experimental data and therefore, I’m seeing a lot of MRI, CT, OCT and digitized microscopic data. Sounds boring? It’s not because we work on many projects with many interesting people.
I love Wolfram Mathematica. I first came in contact with it during my diploma thesis in 2006 because my mentor used it and all algorithms we had were written in it (and CWEB), I basically had no other choice than to get used to it. Now, I’m proficient in the Wolfram language as I use it almost every day. In my free-time, I like to help others as much as I can since the beauty of the language and the underlying concepts are not always obvious to newcomers. Therefore, I’m quite active on mathematica.stackexchange, and you can find me there as halirutan.
You will find that I did some nice projects for StackExchange. Shortly after I joined SE, I wrote a language extension for google-code-prettify to support Mathematica. Back then, someone asked a question on stackoverflow whether this would be possible at all and I decided someone should really do this. Now, my implementation (you find it here on GitHub) is used on stackexchange and even on the official Wolfram Community site. Another thing I’m involved at StackExchange is our SE-Tools package that contains a Mathematica palette that lets you share images and code directly from within Mathematica. Additionally, I wrote an extension for the StackExchange editor because there were certain things that could be optimized for people that write answers very often.
My biggest free-time project so far is the Wolfram Language Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA. It started in 2012 and I still maintain it today. Initially, I was motivated after developing Java with IntelliJ IDEA and was so impressed with its features that I wanted to have the same for the Wolfram Language. Just like Java, the Wolfram language has often pretty long function names that use camel case naming consistently, and the auto-completion of camel case methods was always one mind-blowing feature of IDEA. Another reason for writing such a plugin was to get features like code insight, refactoring, code formatting working.
Since around 2005, I’m an enthusiastic user of Jetbrains products. It started with IntelliJ IDEA for Java and since then I’m using PyCharm for Python projects, CLion for my C/C++ code, and WebStorm for websites. My passion for these IDEs was the reason to start the work on the Wolfram Plugin. In 2020, I took it a step further and joined the Jetbrains Developer Advocacy team.
In the non-virtual world I have a loving wife and one, two, three, four, five awesome
kids and enough hobbies to keep me busy around the clock. I love making music and I have been a guitarist and vocalist in
a band for many years. Recently, I switched to drums because let’s face it, it’s just way more fun.
Additionally, I started playing piano for myself some years ago and I’m reasonably good at it now; not in the way like
she is good at it, but probably in the way she is good at it.
I like to draw from time to time, I have a weakness for perspective and
projection, and I’m generally interested in fonts and calligraphy.
