Language engineering and people.

I’m Kolja a software engineer living in Stuttgart, Germany. I have a strong background in (programming) language engineering aka creating languages and the necessary tools to interact with them. Over the past decade I have created various languages for different domains with varying degree domain specificness from tools used by hunderests of people through multiple organisations to languages tailored to the needs of a handful of experts within a single organisation. In contrast to general purpose languages, which are often driven by technical constrains like parser performance or decades of language evolution, the languages that I designed and built focused much more on the people using them, trying to allow them to express their problems in ways that aligned with they way of thinking rather than translating them into a general language. This has lead to language design that is much more accessible to people without a software engineering background, key abstraction are directly baked into the language and therefor tool can provide much better support for these.

Apart from my passion for language design I have worked in various leadership roles over the years. Growing teams from 4 people in a single room to 45 people spread all over europe as part of a leadership team. I enjoy enabling other people to be able to work the way they feel most comfortable while still balancing the needs of the organisation that hosts them.

Apart from work I enjoy kayaking, cooking and photography. You can find some of my recipes on my german blog and pictures of my food on mastodon.