Hi! I'm Linus.

# Who I am

I'm a self-taught developer focusing on web development and Python.

I was born and raised in Karlsruhe, Germany. In February 2019 I moved to London where I'm working as a Software Engineer at YunoJuno. During high school I started working as a Student Research Assistant at Fraunhofer IOSB, which I left in December 2018.

My favourite color is #0073d5, obviously 😜

I am the proud owner of linus.dev (previously I used linusgroh.de which now redirects here).
Instead of the usual £10 Google charges £150 per year, apparently they figured out how to get an unreasonable amount of money from developers from all over the world.

Good job, Google. What happened to "Don't be evil"?

# What I do

I write code.

I do mostly web development (full stack) and Python and used to to a lot of C# at my previous job.

Technologies include but are not limited to:

• Modern web development: HTML5, CSS3, Sass, JS (ES6), Webpack, Babel, Vue.js, React, and a node_modules directory as large as an operating system. Sigh.
  I know Bootstrap, but I certainly don't love it. Tailwind is great though.
• I've done a lot of different things in the Python ecosystem - I ditched Python 2 quite a while ago and actively use all the cool Python 3 features in my projects: asyncio, f-strings, type annotations, dataclasses. You should too!
• I'm deeply in love with data visualization of all kinds, something I did a lot as a Student Research Assistant. Plotly.js and Chart.js, matplotlib and even gnuplot... And millions of data points visualised in Grafana.
• Various aspects of networking and Computer Vision are also topics I find pretty exciting.
• I know basics of C (electronics projects and Python extensions), Java (for Android only, remember Jelly Bean? - great times!), PHP (mostly for WordPress) and a little shell scripting (if you want to count that in; I use zsh), with skills including everything between "pretty solid" and "horrible".
• I'm familar with MySQL/MariaDB, Sqlite3 and recently use PostgreSQL a lot.
• My main editor is VS Code, I even prefer it over PyCharm these days. nano and sometimes vim in the terminal.

Yep, I'm a nerd 😃

I contribute to Open Source Software.

I ❤️ open source software and maintain a few repositories. In the beginning I occasionally contributed to small and big projects, most notably to PyInstaller - that was when I first learned git, I'm still grateful for the maintainers assisting me... 😉

Later I published some of my own work (IMO still much too little!) and eventually joined the spotify-downloader project as a collaborator and just recently the OwnTracks organisation. Now I use git on a daily basis, both at work and privately - as probably most devs these days.
Obligatory XKCD, though.

Currently I'm working on a contributors page for Gitea and a new web interface for OwnTracks !

See some of my favorite more personal projects below!

I use GNU/Linux.

I use GNU/Linux, mostly Debian-flavoured distributions (not Ubuntu!). My home computer runs a highly themed Linux Mint (most importantly the Plank dock and the gorgeous La Capitaine icon theme by Keefer Rourke !), the VPS this page and other stuff is running on is powered by Debian Server (and nginx, and...). Currently I'm migrating all the stuff to Docker.

I'm using Firefox as my main browser, since day one. And after the death of EdgeHTML I think it's more important than ever. I never experience any performance problems or crashes, this used to be different a few years ago - they did a great job with Quantum. And if you haven't used it recently, you should definitely give it a try (again)! 🔥 🦊

There's bunch of other, often open-source software I'm using on a daily basis as well:

Seriously, I appreciate these icons!

Sometimes I "do hardware".

I use Raspberry Pi s for all kinds of stuff, on most of them I use Raspbian Lite. Incredible little piece of hardware!
Talking about the Raspberry Pi: I also do that kind of tinkering with the ESP8266/32 and sometimes Arduinos.
I own a 3D-printer (it's an Anet A8 from China, so self-built), which is really fun and sometimes even useful!

From time to time I enjoy photography, art, running, climbing & drumming.

I'm an avid runner, I do climbing and ride my bicycle a lot on a daily basis well, I used to do that. Now it's an hour in the tube.
I enjoy creative working, like graphic (and web-)design, also drawing and photography (one of the most challenging and yet beautiful objects being the moon). Arguably code is art too!
I can play the drums, kind of.

# Projects

These are some of the projects I created or contribute to:

rpi-backlight

A Python module for controlling power and brightness of the official Raspberry Pi 7" touch display

When I bought the official 7” touch LCD for my Raspberry Pi, I was happy about it. With one exception: you can’t change the display brightness out of the box.

I investigated for some hours, and hacked some Python code together. Time passed by, and the whole project turned into a Python module: rpi-backlight.

xbox360controller

A pythonic Xbox360 controller API built on top of the xpad Linux kernel driver

This Python Package aims to provide a pythonic and complete API for your Xbox360 and similar game controllers. Currently it's built on top of the Linux kernel driver xpad so you can use it on almost any Linux distribution including your Rasperry Pi projects etc.

The following features are supported:

• Registering callbacks for all Buttons, Axes, Triggers and Hat in a gpiozero-inspired way
• Setting the LED circle; all xpad provided options are possible: blinking, rotating, setting individual LEDs on and off, ...
• Rumbling, both the left and right side can be controlled from 0 to 100 percent

owntracks/frontend

A modern web interface for OwnTracks made with Vue.js

A web interface for OwnTracks, intended to replace the various web pages shipping with the recorder. The OwnTracks frontend is built using Vue.js.
In September 2019 this project has been transferred to the OwnTracks organisation on GitHub, which I'm now a part of. Can't tell you how excited I'm about this!

I'm still actively working on the rewrite, v2 - SPA using Vue SFCs, Webpack, all the nice stuff. Progress has been slow - I really hope we can attract more developers now.

• Last known (i.e. live) locations, location history (data points, line or both), location heatmap
• Display data in a specific date range
• Filter by user and device
• Highly customisable

Have a look at the detailed list of features and some screenshots if you want.

spotify-downloader

Download Spotify playlists with albumart and meta-tags

I'm a collaborator at the spotify-downloader project (initially created by Ritiek Malhotra ) since July 2017.

It's simple to explain: spotify-downloader is a command line tool (GUI is WIP), which takes links to songs or playlists from Spotify, looks for them on YouTube, downloads the audio and saves it with all the metadata and album cover. You end up with an awesome-looking music library!

I'm still grateful he just reached out to me in the first place. Thanks Ritiek!

# Get in touch

Well, just write me an email. Or find me elsewhere on the internet, try linusg.
I would love to hear from you!