Hey, I’m Lukas! I’m a computer scientist from the Cologne-Bonn area in Germany, and I spend pretty much all of my time somewhere between security research, open source software and computer networks.
What I do
By day I’m a research associate at the Mobile Communications Lab at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, where I work on various things reaching from security research to hardware engineering. I studied computer science with a focus on telecommunications at the same university, so in one way or another I’ve been around there for a while. On the side I also take on the occasional freelance software project.
Open source
I’ve been writing and maintaining open source software for a long time. The project most people know me for is dehydrated, an ACME client written entirely in bash. It started life as a tiny shell script back when Let’s Encrypt was brand new and grew into something that runs on a lot of servers around the world. I still look after it today.
Networks
I’m a big fan of computer networks and self-hosting, partly for the tech itself, partly because I’d rather not depend on big corporations. That’s a big part of why I run my own autonomous system, AS62269. It hosts most of my personal infrastructure and lets me experiment with BGP and other routing protocols directly instead of just reading about them.
Community
A lot of what I do happens in and around the hacker and free software community. I’m part of the Chaos Computer Club’s video team (the c3voc), which streams and records talks at conferences, and I also help organize FrOSCon. For both I mostly take care of the IT infrastructure, but I end up doing a bit of everything. On the side I also play capture-the-flag with RedRocket, where we’ve had some fun runs at competitions like the HITB Pro CTF, Google CTF and Midnight Sun CTF.
Off-screen
Real “off-screen” doesn’t really exist for me as all of my hobbies in some way relate to computers, but while I’m not staring to deeply at a terminal I like to dabble with electronics. Over the years that has turned into some fun projects like a light barrier for monitoring bats, a word clock and a DIY IP-KVM. Of course there are a lot more projects and from time to time I might post an article about them, but they mainly are for my own use or entertainment, you’ll be more likely to find infos about them on my Mastodon feed.