About
Hi, I'm Luka Dornhecker. I'm a senior software engineer based in Germany.
Most of my professional work has been backend work using Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, CI, Docker, Kubernetes, and with occasional frontend work sprinkled in. That's the the short version. The full story is that I enjoy learning how a whole system fits together, how all its layers work.
Available for hire
I'm most interested in building backend systems, developer tools, observability products, deployment platforms, infrastructure, or other products where the technical details are part of the product. Remote-friendly work in European time zones is a good fit.
I consider myself a full stack developer and I understand the term "full stack" more literally than people usually do. Not just frontend plus backend. I mean hardware, firmware, networking, backend services, frontend interfaces, and the tooling around all of it. One of my favorite recent projects was connecting a GameBoy Printer to a Raspberry Pi, looking at the SPI traffic with a logic analyzer, and then writing the printer code in Elixir. That kind of project is exactly my taste.
My favorite languages right now are Rust and Elixir. Rust because it gives me all the benefits of a modern programming language that allows for manual memory management, but without the massive downsides and security implications of tradition manually memory mamaged languages. Elixir because OTP brings all the tools needed for building backend services the way they should be build. Small isolated actor processes with explicit supervision instead of wishful thinking.
Outside of work I tend to whatever piques my interest. That can be a small compilers, an interpreter, an emulator, an embedded hardware project, and the occasional game prototype. This usually starts with "I wonder how hard it would be to..." and then I get hooked.
This site is where some of those notes end up.