System Architect & Software Developer. 37 years in the game. 26 professionally.
Building minimal tools that earn every byte. Inspired by the demoscene. Guided by Unix philosophy. Using AI to engineer, educate and validate, not to replicate the bloat faster.
I design systems where reduction is the method, not the compromise. Small binaries. Semantic markup. Honest interfaces. Every abstraction must justify its weight.
Currently Senior Developer at a German DIY wholesale giant, working with React, TypeScript, and Spryker. Privately building small tools for testing ideas, ultralight and rooted in demoscene constraints.
System architecture, performance engineering, and the frontend that sits on top of both. Full-stack, if you must; I prefer to call it taking responsibility for the whole path.
The common thread is root cause over symptom: I would rather remove the reason a system is slow than buy hardware to outrun it.
I keep a German-language record of how that diagnosis is done, at advisor.vivianvoss.net: what gets measured, what a written finding contains, and where the system boundary is drawn. It documents a way of working rather than an offer; I take no mandates.
The writing here runs in three parallel series: Lean Software, on building less and getting more; Unix Universe, on the operating systems that outlived their critics; and IT Philosophy, on why we keep making the same expensive mistakes. Different angles, same argument: complexity is a cost, not an achievement.
/series
├── running
│ ├── unix-universe Mon
│ ├── the-bench-marker Tue
│ ├── lean-software Wed
│ ├── it-philosophy Thu
│ ├── technical-beauty-scope Fri
│ └── bytes-of-art Sat
└── archive 19 series, 2024–2026
Every demo ends with a list of names nobody watches. This one made the names into places: the colonies you fly through carry the names of other groups, and somebody found their own crew's on a structure in the fog.
Six vulnerability reports arrived for faults SQLite has never had, and somebody had to prove it about each of them. Filing costs four seconds, examining costs an afternoon, and the difference is paid by whoever would otherwise be writing the next release.
Every argument for copyleft rests on a claim about you: that without an obligation you would take and give nothing back. Netflix spent five years upstreaming kernel TLS under a licence that could not have compelled a line of it. A staircase of conditions, counted clause by clause.
A ticket marked ASAP took four weeks and closed with nobody at fault, because four departments each measured correctly and each concluded, correctly, that it sat elsewhere. The environment that can reproduce your bug is the one you rent by the month. Eight cloud components to serve the HTML one process served in 1995.
Asked the same question three times over the same file, a machine returned three different counts, each one reasoned. Nothing marked the moment the definition moved. Which is the older problem: an error that arrives without a shape, and a checker nobody has been able to fix since 1948.
No framework. No build step. Measured live in your browser. Pure CAST Daemon.
The numbers above are measured live in your browser: your connection, your device, no averages. Below is what Google thinks of the result. Lighthouse audits four dimensions: raw speed, semantic accessibility, security and API hygiene, and search engine visibility. Four perfect scores from a self-made Rust binary web server with zero dependencies.
Google Lighthouse. Measured on vivianvoss.net, this site, served by CASTD — an extremely fast self-made and full scale web and content server written in pure Rust with zero dependencies.
