Software Architect and Developer

Architecture, Consulting and Development for a VR medical realtime eye tracking application. Development best practices, reviews. Agile processes consulting. High performance C++. Evaluation of data and transport via ZeroMQ interfaces.

Technologies:

• C++17, CMake, Visual Studio
• Python
• UML
• Azure Devops, git, Jira, Confluence, etc
• Boost, asio, ZeroMQ
• Unity, C#

Architecture consulting and development for simulating confidential processes. Plugin development, C++ / OpenCL Development, Help setting up productization.

Technologies:

• C++20
• Nuke NDK
• Azure Devops
• Boost, Boost Compute, OpenCL
• UML, git, CMake, Visual Studio

Architecture consulting and development in the field of cloud based rendering using the Unreal Engine. Architecture and development of a AWS connection plugin which enables the engine to interact with cloud native services.

Technologies:

• Unreal Engine 4
• AWS SDK, serverless, Python CDK (Infrastructure as Code)
• VPC, CloudFront, CloudWatch, XRay
• C++17
• UML, git, CMake, Visual Studio

Architecture and development of a cloud rendering plugin for the Unreal Engine. Project management and coordination of a number of stakeholders and partner developers. Requirement engineering and architectural design documentation.

Techologies:

• Unreal Engine 4
• Raytracing, image processing
• C++17
• git, Visual Studio

Various projects in the area of development and visualization of physics and driving simulation, networking and software architecture.

Driving simulation

Consulting and development of a real time driving simulation solution by integrating HIL simulation system live data into a high end visualization and VR solution. Starting with requirement engineering, through architecture and development of now 7 releases I have worked on this project from the start. Focus was always on flexibility, performance and customization. It includes real time evaluation of data received from a simulation system and feeding into a VR scene through an SDK layer.

Notable technologies include:

• Platform independent C and C++11, parallelization
• Qt, MVC
• Wide variety of Boost libraries, specifically Boost Spirit & Phoenix to develop a domain specific language (DSL) that allows for flexible application of data into the scene graph
• Python, CMake, git, Visual Studio
• Atlassian Toolchain (Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Jenkins)
• UML2, 4+1 model

In subsequent releases this project was further developed to adapt to more use cases and customer specific requirements. This includes:

• Recording and playback of simulated driving sessions
• Edit and modification of such recordings
• Connection to further slave controlled machines to enable various simultaneous VR sessions upon the same data
• More complex and stateful Domain Specific Language expressions
• Track editor
• Remote REST interface
• Parallel data sources
• Eye Tracking

Video Streaming Component

For a new developed HPC based distributed rendering solution I developed a component which enabled those remote rendered content to be displayed anywhere. This included very high performance standards in terms of resolution, frame rate and adaptive quality adjustments.

• Platform independent C and C++11, Boost libraries
• ASIO, Spirit, HTTP client and server / REST

Physics simulation

This project too was designed and developed by me from day 1. Core content is the abstraction and integration of several physics simulation engines such as bullet, ODE or PhysiX into a VR environment to enable the user to interact with a scene in a life like fashion. To simulate collisions and joint constraints as well as edit those scenes interactively. 2 backends were implemented and several investigated.

Further development included mechanisms to automatically adapt complex geometries to simulation needs (convex decomposition). Also performance was greatly enhanced and further input means such as force feedback devices were modeled.

Technologies in use include:

• Plattform independent C++, Boost, Qt, CMake, git, Visual Studio / GCC
• Boost.Spirit, Phoenix
• partially Windows and Linux specifics
• Parallelization and GPU (OpenCL) acceleration
• TCP / UDP protocol layers
• Bullet, ODE, Newton, PhysX and analysis of further physics engines

Video streaming

This project realized a platform independent video solution to grab arbitrary desktop content and apply it to a interactive texture inside a VR scene in real time. The user inside VR can freely interact with that streamed content as if it were direct. In additional releases the software was extended with HTTPS / SSL transport layer encryption including client certificate verification and further multi platform adaptations. Specifically Linux.

• Video Streaming
• Motion JPEG, libjpeg, TurboJPEG, H.264
• Service Discovery
• C++, Boost, Qt Toolchain, Cmake, git, Visual Studio
• OpenSSL, certificate validation
• libX11

The system is being used by automobile industry to embed simulated instruments and devices such as on-board entertainment or driving assist electronics into a VR driving simulation.

After I could hand over PowerHouse development to a new team I was assigned architect for the whole RTT systems, a position that I still hold today. This involves 5 teams, primarily focussed on realtime 3D visualization. I share this task with one other architect and appreciate this team work.

• Architecture and conception of a new software platform for the RTT products
• Special focus on resource efficiency and threading, also a flexible data model and hardware and platform independence
• Conception of work packages out of the whole concept
• Communication of technical plans and situations to the management
• Project management and coaching
• Guidelines and development paradigms
• Componentization
• Modern build processes (CMake, Continuous Integration)
• Automated tests, integration tests and unit tests
• Development model (Spiral, Scrum, Waterfall, etc)

Unix system development in various areas:

• Spam protection and implementation into the mail systems. Security concepts mostly in connection with SMTP and coordination with other parts of the United Internet group (1&1, web.de), technical lead in mail system development
• Technical responsibility for planning and implementation of a new company wide mailsystem for all 3 brands, GMX, Web.de and 1&1
• Continuous improvements in security and spam protection issues
• Backup solution for the customers on-line file store of GMX and 1and1. Therefore development of a filesystem monitoring kernel module as well as several daemons for a very large Linux cluster with high data volume
• Integration of a new virus scan engine. Technical responsibility for virus scanning
• New backend solution for a flexible high performance interface to connect the mail stores with the web frontend. Dynamic caching.
• Infrastructure daemon for fast access and dispatching of remote procedure calls
• Numerous other tasks in the mail system area, software for many hundred servers, mostly Linux

Quality assurance and software test

• Design of graphical widget classes for BitCtrl
• Development of Java applets for real-time visualisation. These applets could be integrated into websites to monitor critical data of industrial facilities such as power plants and mass transit systems.
• Programming of tools in C on a QNX platform. Those tools configured the password database of the web servers
• Maintenances and upgrades on a Linux server

• Practical term of my studies
• Installation of a network based upon a Windows NT RAID Server as PDC for the medical research facility. Integration of this Windows Domain into the existing Unix environment
• Automatic backup solution for vital medical data under the strict rules of the german medical authorities