About

What the heck does this crazy title mean?

As an engineer, doing mostly mechanical simulations of different kind in the past and doing now software developement, most of my work heavily depends on computers. To name an example, consider mechanical simulations with the Finite Element Method (FEM). Almost all computations one runs, are completely impossible to perform by hand. This means you can do amazing things, if you combine your brain and some smart algorithms. Viewing it from a kind of infantile perspective, you extend your brain.

What the hell is this blog for?

Always, I encounter some some new technique, little hack, great tool or library, there is the thought that it should be documented somewhere. So why not share it!

I do not guarantee that anything you find on this blog is usefull to you! At least it is usefull for me.
If there is also some benefit for you, that's great. If not, sorry for wasting your time.

You can find allmost all of the information on this blog somewhere else! I try to give clear references from  where I gather the information. But maybe you like my style or the composition.

Please keep in mind, that this blog is in the first case my personal cheat sheet.

Who am I?

Comming from a computational mechanics background, I joined the science business for some years were I was mainly concerned with simulation techniques and experimentation. Within this period, I was slowly drawn into this mysterious programming thing and finally switched completely into the software developement business.

I do most off my work on Linux using Open Source Software, but I try hard not to be dogmatic or fanboyish (really!).

My prefered language is Python, because it is very popular in science and comes with some great libraries, numpy, scipy, matplotlib to name a few. You can find almost everything you need and most of it is packed into the runtime. It is further concise an elegant (to my opinion), doesn't stand in your way, is very produktive and fits the engineers brain (at least mine).

Recently, I play with Golang. I'm not the drop-python-for-golang guy. IMHO, there is some prolific coexistance between the to.