Timeline
Hello my name is Dean. I'm currently studying computer science in west Germany.
September 2026
Beginning of my computer science studies at university.June 2026
Server hosting, cluster management with Kubernetes, backups, security, continuous integration and this Website.
February 2026
The go-kart project really got my love and my nerves. It was the final project at that school and spanned over one year. In a team of four we upgraded a Kettcar with typical car features using AVR microcontrollers and self-designed PCBs. This project had been worked on over many years and had turned into an undocumented mess. My role covered the cockpit, lights, and structuring the CAN-Bus communication. So this picked up on what I like: microcontrollers and a lot of C programming.
March 2025
My first self-designed PCB in school. In the previous year we learned the basics of electronics: voltage, current, circuits, resistance, capacity, inductivity and more. The PCB project extended the list with transistors, thyristors, diodes, and reading datasheets.
October 2024
My classmates and I built a float for the Oktoberfest parade in Germany. My job was to develop the motor controller. I had never used a microcontroller before. An Arduino R3 board was used, but to make it a bit harder I chose to program in C instead of using the Arduino framework. I wrote a program without libraries to control the stepper motors:
avr-motor-controller at Github
. I wouldn't recommend using that library, it's missing the ability to power the motor smoothly with PWM.June 2024
Built a webapp for a retirement home.
February 2024
My first year in high school (Abitur). In the Java programming class we got the task to follow a 2D game tutorial and create a documentation. Retyping the tutorial was a bit boring, so I made my own version: FluffyDespite my large time investment I got a bad grade for it because it didn't follow the tutorial. Anyway, the visitors on Open House day loved it.
June 2023
Built a tool to show server temperature and other metrics on a Website. This was my first project to use Rust. The backend used Rust axum and vanilla Javascript was used for the frontend.
February 2023
In a prototype called
Shadow-Intruder
, I experimented with procedural world generation, path finding (using A*), 3D modeling and game mechanics like shooting and movement. The image shows four generated world tiles with water, grass, and mountains. You can see how I was debugging the lighting: I visualized the poly normal vectors with a script using different colors. Normals are used to calculate basic lighting. The lighting didn't look correct on the border between tiles. To fix this, the adjacent polygons had to be included for the normal vector calculation. The adjacent polygons are highlighted in pink.
This was before my higher education (Abitur) and I hadn't learned about vectors in school. I watched YouTube tutorials about Linear Algebra.
August 2021
New equipment and new projects. I loved and still love the YouTube videos about AI learning to play a game. So I wanted to learn how AI works. But I didn't want to just use an existing library -- I wanted to know how it worked behind the scenes. After all, this wasn't a project that needed to be production-ready. Note that I started it before the AI hype from ChatGPT's release in 2022. At this time I also learned about Git and GitHub. So I built the C++ library called Seayon just by following the YouTube series of 3Blue1Brown on Neural Networks. My goal was to use it as a trading AI. Spoiler: you can't beat Wall Street with a plain Neural Network. In the end I still learned a lot and improved my math grades.December 2020
Built an Android app for a Butcher with multiple shops, so customers can read information about a specific product. The product information was provided in the form of PDFs.
June 2019
The Minecraft server wasn't really as popular as I hoped, so I abandoned it as well as my YouTube channel in 2018. Surprisingly a few friends actually starting playing a lot on it in 2020, when I had already lost interest. In 2019, I got an actual desk and started learning about Java, C# and desktop app development. I liked the idea of cryptocurrency, so I built a digital bank (BankDemo at GitHub ) with a server-client system without encryption. The tutorial I followed was about a chat program using Java. After that I wanted to look into C#, which I did by building a Steam clone ( ArcadeHub at GitHub ).
2017
Published a YouTube video about the Minecraft server. I was 12 years old at this point.
February 2016
Starting from 2014, I was a big Minecraft fan for the next years. Around 2016 came the idea to build my own Minecraft server. My advantage was that my father ran a technical company and had a Windows server for me to use.
before 2016
My first contact with things outside the normal user space started with a video on YouTube about "hacking" a Wi-Fi password with the Windows command line. It wasn't about actual hacking but rather reading the passwords of Wi-Fi networks already saved on the computer. After all that didn't really matter because it successfully showed me my Wi-Fi password, and I was convinced cmd.exe was some kind of hacker tool. I wanted to learn more, so I searched on YouTube and found this series:
CMD Tutorial Deutsch von ANSPictures (2010)
November 2014
Start of YouTube channel: Recorded gaming videos with Phone and later learned about screen recording with OBS.