Software Engineer interested in smart systems and the interactions between smart people needed to create them

About

This page is here to tell you a bit about me and what I do.

You can also dowload my CV!

Aside from Software

While it’s unsual as an Austrian, I haven’t been skiing in years, but like to spend my spare time hiking with my dog, kayaking, eating (and occassionally cooking) good food, driving old cars and recently writing tech articles.

Smart Systems

I’m deeply interested in classical and modern AI methods, and generally in systems behaving intelligently. While I was able to spend some time on these topics working at incubedIT and in university, lately I’ve started making games to explore AI techniques.

Agile Software Development

Since taking part in adopting and figuring out Agile at a small startup, both general Agile principles and the practices of creating software that allows for being agile fascinate me.

Education

Sharing knowledge has been a common theme in my professional life, starting from my civilian service, through my studies to my work and personal projects. Recently this finds its main expression in writing articles to share my knowledge and volunteering as a referre for RoboCup Junior Austria, a yearly robotics competition for school children.

What I do

Things I’ve done and found noteworthy enough to put here

  • June 2019

    Seeing some colleagues struggle using git and reading a great article on a different idea of teaching git, I’ve written a tutorial intended to help people understand some key git concepts, instead of memorizing commands.

    Read and do it on github or dev.to

  • April 2019

    Rescue League Referee at RoboCupJunior Austrian Open Innsbruck

  • February 2019

    Clean Tests

    Getting interested in what makes a good test after reading Clean Code and spending some time on writing tests and doing code-reviews at work, I’ve written an article.

    Read it here

  • 2018 - Present

    Refactoring of my old Character Generator Project

    In late 2018 I started refactoring my Shadowrun Character Generator. Looking back at code you wrote years ago, can sometimes be shocking, and I’m not proud of showing off that old project. Splitting it into more logical modules, drasticly reducing the size of classes and code-duplication, as well as adding tests, is an on-and-off project.

  • October 2018 - Present

    Learning in practice

    As working part-time while studying, quickly turned into studying while working, in 2018 I made the decision to interrupt my studies to focus fully on learning new things in practice. At incubedIT I have the chance to focus on Software Architecture in an agile team.

  • April 2018

    Rescue League Referee at RoboCupJunior Austrian Open Linz

  • 2016

    Refactoring of incubedIT agent logic framework

    Major refactoring and reworking of the framework used to define business process logic, including usability improvments ranging from API improvements and addition of a fluent API to a grahpical display and debugging tool, allowing to remotely view and influence process execution on a robot.

  • July 2016 - October 2018

    incubedIT and Master's studies

    After earning my Bachelor’s degree, I started working at incubedIT while also pursuing a Master’s degree in Computer Science, with a focus on Robotics and AI.

  • July 2016

    Bachelor's Thesis: A Semantic Map Implementation for a Long-TermAutonomous Robot

    Research, Design and Implementation of a Semantic Map for a long-term autonomous robotic system using ROS and OpenPRS (Procedural Reasoning).

    You can read my thesis here and find the accompanying source code on gitlab

  • April 2016

    Rescue League Referee at RoboCupJunior Austrian Open Innsbruck

  • 2014

    Character Generator for Pen & Paper Roleplaying Game

    Design and development of a multiplatform character generator and viewer for the 5th edition of the P&P Game Shadowrun. Done using Java as a personal project started in 2014.

  • October 2013 - July 2016

    Computer Science Studies

    After moving from Tyrol to Graz in 2013, I earned my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science at Technical University Graz.

  • January 2011 - July 2013

    Teaching Studies

    I fulfilled my mandatory civil service in a home for children from troubled families. Here I learned how much I enjoy sharing knowledge and helping someone learn new things, which made me decide to study to become a teacher of Computer Science and English.

    Realizing during my studies that being a teacher in the Austrian school system, where direction usually changes every election, is not something I want to spend my life on, I ended up going back to my original idea of just studying Computer Science after a while.

Contact

Check out my articles on dev.to, my projects on github and gitlab, or just send me an email if you would like to get in touch!

nico@riedmann.dev