About me
You're in for a boring story...
Hello!
My name is Chris, but here I am also known as "VdoP", as the page already suggests.
Where this nickname comes from is a long story!
To sum it up: I listened to Pantera and their album "vulgar display of power" came up on my machine in xmms (wow, the feels...) right when I needed a nickname!
My name is Chris, but here I am also known as "VdoP", as the page already suggests.
Where this nickname comes from is a long story!
To sum it up: I listened to Pantera and their album "vulgar display of power" came up on my machine in xmms (wow, the feels...) right when I needed a nickname!
Actually, my life has been pretty boring and straightforward.
School, "Abitur", studied chemistry and physics in Freiburg, then continued as a PhD student there at a
particle
physics experiment at CERN.
My thesis work there was the development of event generators and enhancing the simulation software for the
experiment based on Geant4 written in C++ with the Qt toolkit.
Programming
Programming is one of my favorite activities and has been so for a long time.
I started on a DOS PC - a 486 - with qbasic when I was 12 years old and the dream of programming games
one day.
While never really developing a game, I wrote some tax-helpers in object pascal and later Delphi for my
family,
implemented a forum and small-scale CMS in PHP4 and later PHP5 for my high school classmates.
At the age of 17 I got in contact with Linux and inevitably C++ which has been my go-to tool besides
python for most problems.
Out of necessity to keep an old Thinkpad running without having to abandon all the Qt applications I
wrote Razor-Qt - a desktop toolkit.
It was completely modular, very lightweight and based on Qt.
Due to time constraints (state exams :/ ) I gave the project, at that time still at SourceForge,
to two other programmers who made it big.
Over the course of my career as a programmer and software architect I worked with CUDA, OpenGL, wrote SSE code, developed image processing code for computer vision with opencv and a lot more. Just recently I somehow stumbled across this cool language called Rust. The promises it gives to programmers resonated with me, being a solution to the greated problems in C++ development. After reading and writing some rusty code, I decided to migrate my homepage to a rust-based system.
Over the course of my career as a programmer and software architect I worked with CUDA, OpenGL, wrote SSE code, developed image processing code for computer vision with opencv and a lot more. Just recently I somehow stumbled across this cool language called Rust. The promises it gives to programmers resonated with me, being a solution to the greated problems in C++ development. After reading and writing some rusty code, I decided to migrate my homepage to a rust-based system.
Martial Arts
While studying in Freiburg I felt my body getting more and more out of shape.
I wondered which sport to start to feel healthy again and came to the conclusion, that it had to be a
martial art due to my competitive nature it felt like a perfect fit.
At first I tried Wing Chun for about a year, but it couldn't fully scratch my itch for hardcore competition.
One thing lead to another and before long I found myself in a Muay Thai gym. It became my second passion
next to programming.
All in all I spent around one and a half year in Thailand training myself and bringing some western boxing
to the local gym.
About ten years into actively doing Muay Thai I decided to take the next step.
After getting a teacher's certificate from MTBD, the largest Muay Thai federation in Germany,
I started giving classes at my home gym in Freiburg, Germany. Fun fact: Structuring a complex content in
martial arts
is not that different from software architecture in more than a few aspects:
- We need to break down complexity,
- yet pieces need to fall into place in the end,
- clear graphical representations help a lot,
- recurring patterns should be used to our advantage
- ...
My Mantra
A wise Muay Thai coach of mine once told me a proverb which as been told in many variations. His was:
Talent is helpful but ultimately peripheral, perseverance is what prevails.It ultimately became my mantra both professionally and in private. While traveling Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam in 2013 for more kickboxing input, I went to a café where I grabbed a pack of sugar. It was just too funny,to not take a picture right on the spot:
