Prior to my studies I conducted many hobby projects related to electrical and mechanical engineering and informatics (see fig. 1). For instance, I built several pieces of wooden furniture, a pair of speakers, a subwoofer, and an audio amplifier. I designed and built several quadcopters and selected components for countless desktop PCs and assembled them. Furthermore, I designed and manufactured printed circuit boards and small analog and digital electric circuits. I first learned programming in C/C++ on Atmel AVR microcontrollers, for which I built the periphery (power supply and ISP programmer) on my own (Arduino wasn’t really known yet). One of my larger projects was a custom PC Case in 2010, for which I got sponsors and which I documented in a project diary in the PC Games Hardware Forum that received about 2000 replies and 160000 reads. From 2011 to 2016, I documented all my projects on a self-hosted website based on WordPress, for which I developed my own theme. Here, I got into contact with databases and web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, and the HTTP protocol for the first time. Apart from this, some friends and I initiated the “THOMAS” robotics group in school that is still around today. In this group, we built and programmed THOMAS, a low-cost robotics vehicle made from old PC hardware and vehicle parts, which was controlled by microcontrollers and a Linux PC.

earlier_projects Fig. 1: Some of my earlier hobby projects.