About
Hello there!
I’m Lars, a 22 year old computing nerd from Germany. You might also know me by one of a couple nicknames. 1 In the last couple years, I have mostly been going by “luatic” online.
Programming
A lot of my life revolves around programming.
Due to a lucky coincidence, I started to learn programming relatively early, by making little 2d video games in Python. I’ve now programmed for well over a decade. I’ve taken an interest in programming language design and implementation, including niche or esoteric programming languages.
Computer science, software development, and various related activities have become the things I spend most of my time on.
I like learning new languages and tools if they genuinely have new ideas to offer. Over the years, I have picked up many languages and tools for different purposes. I can get up to speed in a new “mainstream” language relatively quickly. The languages I have used so far include
- C++, C, Zig
- Java, Golang, Dart
- Python, PHP, JavaScript, Lua
Among them, Lua resonates with me the most: I find it hits the sweet spot where it is simultaneously very simple and useful. Other programming languages may be more useful, or more simple, but I’m yet to find a language that is both. 2
Formal education
I have a Bachelor’s in Computer Science (with honors) from the University of Bonn. My bachelor thesis concerned the efficient computation of the Graph Edit Distance.
I’m currently doing my Master’s with a focus on Algorithmics while working part-time as a Student Research Assistant in the Computational Analytics group.
I am interested both in neat theoretical results for algorithms, as well as making implementations perform well in practice, on real(istic) instances. (This blend is often called “algorithm engineering”.)
Hobbies
Don’t worry, I do also enjoy things outside of the digital world! Currently I play beach volleyball for fun. I’m not very good at it yet, but I hope to be decent one day. I also like reading, especially Sci-Fi. Occasionally I play chess. I am always happy to meet new people!
Links
- You can follow most of my free software development activity on my GitHub account. Many of my projects are related to the Luanti voxel game platform. Nowadays, I am mostly active as a Luanti core developer.
- You can find my old Luanti mods on ContentDB. I also have a forum account, but I have stopped being active.
- I used to answer programming questions on StackOverflow. I am still happy to explain programming concepts or help with problems, but I’m not active on StackOverflow anymore.
Bloarg
The site name is not a typo. “Bloarg” is a portmanteau of blog, blag and blarg. And maybe bloat if you wish. Simply a place for me to share my writings with you.
Contact
If you want to reach out, feel free to send an email to hi@luatic.dev.
You might also like
e.g. “appguru[eu|lars]” or “LMD” ↩︎
For some examples of Lua’s elegance, you can check out this collection of algorithms and data structures implemented in Lua. I also expect to publish various blog posts on aspects of Lua’s design. ↩︎