About Me
Origins
I was born in 1999 in the town of Aschaffenburg in the beautiful region of Bavaria, Germany. I wasn't even a year old before my family relocated to Detroit, Michigan, USA. I don't have many memories from this time, the exception being a fall down the stairs that must have been traumatic enough to leave an impression on my infant mind.
After moving back to Germany again, we finally settled in Windsor, Ontario, Canada in 2005. This would become my home for the next 17 years or so. After high school, I went to the prestigious University of Waterloo to study Computer Science. I graduated in 2022 with a Bachelor's degree, finishing with around 2 years of coop experience and an additional minor in music.
Computer Science
or, how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the CodeI got my first taste of programming in elementary school, with a visual programming language called Scratch. It was primarily for games, and I remember when most of the class was following a tutorial to make a simple game about shooting objects, I decided to veer off path and learn how to make elements move around. I ended up building a little spaceship game where you could fly around the screen and shoot enemies. It even had 5 levels!
Soon after, I was tinkering with GameMaker Studio and learning C++ and Java in high school. My brother taught me what he had learned in computer science class, and I followed his footsteps taking those classes, and eventually pursuing that passion at university. The University of Waterloo was a bit of a gauntlet- the coursework was intense, and looking for a new co-op job every 4 months was stressful- but I learned that the reputation and what it taught me was worth its weight in gold. My coop opportunities were varied, from fintech to gaming startups, but they taught me a lot about the actual industry and secured me a full-time offer before I even graduated.
I've been building software ever since- from web apps to games to internal tools. I love the process of solving problems with code, and the feeling of satisfaction when something finally works the way you intended it to. I have experience with both frontend and backend development, and enjoy working with a variety of programming languages and frameworks.
These last few years, I've fallen in love with Rust as my go-to language for high performance applications. I hear it's a bit of a cult, and I'm thoroughly an acolyte. Forget the robust memory safety, for me it's the expressive type system and mix of functional and imperative paradigms that really win me over. I've used it for everything from competitive programming to procedural generators to game jams.
Games
I grew up playing video games- one of my biggest regrets to this day is agreeing to give away our GameCube that had a period of disuse as we grew up- it would have been so cool to have it during college! But I always remembered me and my brother playing games on the computer and then mimicking them when playing with Legos. The idea of creating my own games was a consistent dream throughout my childhood.
As outlined previously, I started my game making journey tinkering with Scratch and GameMaker Studio. I never did really complete a project, as that wasn't a muscle I had developed yet. I tried many times to make text-based RPGs, but it always fizzled out as I bit off more than I could chew with my limited abilities at the time. It wasn't until my coops that I got to work on games that would see release.
Once I graduated, I finally began pursuing game jams, which I think is the perfect way to train that muscle of completing projects. With a limited time frame and a clear goal, I was able to focus and ship several small games. I've participated in the GMTK Game Jam multiple times now, and have had the joy of working with many talented friends.
The first engine with which I shipped a game was Unity, but working with it professionally made me feel like its size and sluggishness were holding me back. I started learning Godot in 2024, and have loved its lightweight nature and speed ever since. Now that I have many game jams under my belt, I have my sights set on a larger project- perhaps an indie release sometime in the next few years.
I would be remiss if I didn't mention my love for board games and tabletop RPGs as well. My girlfriend and I own over 100 board games, and I have a shelf of RPG books waiting to be used. We've done a board game jam before, but I would love to explore this space more in the future. I've been tinkering with my own RPG system for a while now, and someday will be confident enough to release it to the public.
Languages
Growing up bilingual in German and English, I always had an interest in languages. I learned French early on in school, and had some exposure to Spanish and Mandarin. In university, I also took a semester each of Arabic and Japanese, not enough to remember too much, but enough to appreciate the complexity and beauty of those languages.
In a diverse place like Canada, many of my friends spoke different languages at home, and I loved learning bits and pieces from them. Of course, it's often the swear words that you learn first. Still, I think language connects you to culture in a unique way, and I love being able to appreciate that. I very much hope my future children will grow up speaking German.
As a kid, I also loved making up my own languages- conlangs, as they're called. I created entire alphabets and grammar systems for my imaginary languages, imagining their place in fictional worlds. I don't get to do it as much, but my interest in conlanging persisted. There's a whole reddit community dedicated to it over at r/conlangs. I have some ideas for conlanging tools that may find their way onto this site in the future.
By now, I've read near every Wikipedia page on phonology I could get my hands on, and would consider myself an amateur linguist. My bookshelf at home has many grammars of different languages, from Ancient Greek to Aramaic to Logbara. The field I'm most interested in is historical linguistics- how languages change over time. If I hadn't pursued computer science, I think I would have loved to study linguistics at the University of Toronto. Who knows, maybe in the future...