About me

No hero story. Just how it happened, with a few detours and lucky accidents.

Hey.
I'm Chris, and online I also go by "VdoP".
Where that came from is a long story.
Short version: Pantera was playing, "Vulgar Display of Power" popped up in xmms, and right then I needed a nickname. Still one of the better timing moments in my life. This page is my long version of who I am: science nerd, code nerd, husband, and dad.

Life path was pretty straight. School, Abitur, then chemistry and physics in Freiburg, then a PhD there in particle physics at CERN. My thesis work was event generators and simulation software, mostly in Geant4/C++ with Qt around it. Somewhere between simulation work and late-night debugging, I realized I loved building software as much as I loved physics. That mix set the tone for everything that came later. It also taught me how to handle complexity without panic: break things down, measure properly, iterate.

After my PhD I spent almost two years at Fraunhofer IPM as developer and project lead. Quite frankly, I needed a job, and I had met my girlfriend during my PhD (now my wife), so staying in Freiburg for a while made total sense. That chapter taught me the difference between clever prototypes and software people rely on in real projects. It also sparked my long-term interest in architecture and maintainability.
On the technical side, I got to work on computer vision projects. I cannot share much, but one has a public youtube video: here. One project in particular was heavy CUDA/OpenGL interop on NVIDIA GPUs: pushing single executors to the limit while keeping multi-client throughput stable. Challenging work, great people, and lots of lessons I still use today.

rendered image of large angle spectrometer from TGEANT

Still, I needed a new chapter. I wanted to go deeper into long-living product software and learn from people who had already been through that journey. Around the same time, my girlfriend and I were ready to relocate. She got a job in Mannheim, and after several interviews I joined Volume Graphics in Heidelberg (later Hexagon).

This became my first long real industry chapter. I learned a lot about team dynamics, product pressure, and shipping software that has to keep working year after year. I went deep into a large C++ codebase, did a lot of refactoring work, and introduced BDD-style UI testing with Squish into the quality pipeline. Working closely with devops/techops also pulled me further into the infrastructure side. Many people there shaped how I think about engineering and leadership. But the biggest shifts happened outside work: I married my girlfriend and became a dad. Paternity can do crazy things with your brain, and stuff that I didn't think about before became more important. I learned that my limits were wider than I thought when purpose is clear. After five years in the same environment, I felt ready for a bigger move.

Farewell gift from Hexagon colleagues with best wishes and anecdotes

That's when SPREAD.ai came into the picture. What convinced me was not buzzwords but people: strong leadership, sharp engineers, high standards, low ego. For a tech nerd, that is basically catnip. I could go deep technically while growing into larger leadership responsibility: from Rust/TypeScript platform work to late-night discussions about graph storage and lock-free B+ tree ideas.

Beginning of 2026, I was offered the Head of Engineering position at SPREAD together with Daniel Wilms, a true graph legend. Following leaders like Tomas Karlsson and Steinunn Arnardottir is a huge responsibility. But if this story has a theme, it is probably this: I like to solve hard problems, I like to build strong teams, and I am always up for a good challenge.

Programming

Programming has been part of my life since I was 12. I started on a DOS box (486) with QBasic and the classic "I'll make games" fantasy. I did not become a game dev, but I built all kinds of nerdy side tools: tax helpers for family in Delphi, then a forum and small CMS in PHP4/PHP5 for classmates.
At 17 I moved to Linux and, basically by fate, to C++. For many years C++ plus Python was my default setup. I even built Razor-Qt to keep an old ThinkPad alive without giving up Qt apps. Later, during state exam phase and zero free time, I handed the project over on SourceForge. Watching others continue it was honestly a great feeling.
Over time I ended up in all the fun rabbit holes: performance tuning, SSE, OpenGL/CUDA paths, image processing, build tooling pain, and all the little edge cases that only appear Friday night before release. Then Rust happened and just clicked with how I like to work: explicit, reliable, and fast enough for serious systems work.
These days my baseline is simple: keep architecture understandable, automate boring safety checks, and ship in small reliable steps. Moving this blog to a Rust stack felt like the natural consequence.

Old Razor-Qt desktop environment screenshot

Martial Arts

During my Freiburg years I noticed I was getting out of shape. I wanted a sport that would drag me back into discipline, and because I am naturally competitive, martial arts was an easy choice. I started with Wing Chun, but after about a year I switched to Muay Thai because I wanted more pressure testing and competition. That became my second big passion next to programming. In total I spent around one and a half years in Thailand, training hard and mixing in Western boxing. It gave me structure when life got noisy and changed how I deal with stress: less overthinking, more focused execution.

Around ten years into Muay Thai I took the next step and started coaching. After getting a teacher's certificate from MTBD (largest Muay Thai federation in Germany), I taught classes at my home gym in Freiburg. Fun fact: coaching fighting and building software are weirdly similar:

break down complexity,
make sure pieces fit at the end,
good visuals help a lot,
patterns save energy.

For my own training I later moved more into Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, but that's another story. Coaching made me much better at explaining things clearly, on the mat and in code.

My Mantra

A Muay Thai coach once told me a proverb that stuck for good:

Talent is helpful but ultimately peripheral, perseverance is what prevails.

It became my mantra, in work and private life. I keep coming back to it whenever projects, teams, or life get messy. Not because it sounds poetic, but because in the long run it keeps proving true. During a trip through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam in 2013, I grabbed a sugar packet in a cafe and saw this line. Too good not to take a photo.