About devgrind
The Blog
devgrind is a blog project from developers for developers. We, its authors, bring along a wide range of experience in the field of industrial and academic software development, yet we consider ourselves primarily just an ambitious bunch of IT geeks.
The aim of devgrind is to share and discuss questions as well as insights in the area of software development…and sometimes to just geek out. Typical topics you will find at devgrind are
- programming: paradigms & languages, idioms, techniques, …
- software engineering: models, methods, processes, …
- technology that affects us as developers, such as frameworks, standards, tools, …
- formal and theoretical aspects of software systems: decidability, syntax & semantics, logics, …
- “soft skills” and non-technical aspects of software development: management, social aspects, career progression, …
- developer humor
- other geeky stuff
Our ambition is to broaden our own perspective and learn more about the developer’s life, one posting at a time. And to have someone actually read the weird stuff we sometimes make up beween the coding sessions. To put it in one sentence:
thinking outside the { }
The Crew
Magnus Niemann
Magnus is currently employed as a research assistant at the Freie Universität Berlin, but his heart is beating for software modeling and development. He is on his way away from the theoretical, prototypical university research applications to the practical, hardcore industry systems. Having started programming with Apple Basic and UCSD Pascal somewhere in the 1980s, he has now about twelve years of teaching and programming experience with Java, J2EE and Python. Magnus has a programming language fetish and thus, a lot more languages are in his portfolio, e.g. OPAL, Prolog, ML, PHP, Modula-2, Pascal and lately Ruby (thanks to Arne).
Besides writing for devgrind, Magnus maintains a personal blog (german).
Arne Handt
Arne Handt works as a freelance software developer and consultant in thea area of mobile and web-based software sysems. His development experience comprises more than ten years of software development, spanning product development as well as work on customer and research projects, mainly in Java/JEE contexts. Additionally, he has been developing DB-driven web apps for several years, using mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP, and mobile applications on the Android platform.
His areas of interest are mobile computing, distributed systems, formal aspects of programming languages and agile approaches to software development. His preferred programming languages (at the moment) are Java and Ruby, he has a soft spot for purely functional languages, such as Haskell, though.
Christopher Sahnwaldt
Christopher works as a software developer. He currently uses Java, but is still hoping for an opportunity to work with C++ before the language withers away. He started with Basic, Pascal and C in the eighties, and enjoys coding interesting data structures and algorithms, although his working days seem to be filled with the intricacies of things like SOAP, XSLT, Spring, Java ClassLoaders, Ant, bash scripts, etc. pp.
His less practical interests include history, literature, and the language that will replace Java and C#.