The Geek Talk

Who is Christian Neukirchen?

Christian Neukirchen (aka chris2) has been programming Ruby since 2001. As lead developer of the abstract webserver interface Rack, he is committed to unifying the Ruby web development landscape.  He also authored several other Ruby libraries, among them the popular BDD frameworks test/spec and bacon. To the Internet community, he is known for creating the first tumblelog, Anarchaia, and its successor Trivium.
Currently he is studying Mathematics and Computer Science in Munich.

What does your typical day look like?

When hungry I eat, when tired I sleep, when I want to hack, I hack.

What do you do in your free time?

What’s that, free time?

Where and when did you start programming?

My first programs were in QBASIC, perhaps 1996 or something?  Later I learned Pascal and C, awk, Perl, until I stumbled upon Ruby.  I also learned a lot about language design and looked a lot at more academic languages like Scheme, ML, Haskell.  I’m a programming language geek.

Favorite: Programming Languages, Frameworks?

My dream language doesn’t exist, but Ruby is pretty close to it. Sometimes I wish, it had better support for functional programming.
I don’t really use any frameworks, except Rack of course.  I have a few small wrapper libraries I use for my own stuff.

What OS do you prefer?

Anything unixish.  I currently work on Linux mainly, but I have used OS X for a few years.  I don’t want back.  I run Arch Linux and Debian on my machines.  Sometimes I consider switching to BSDs.  I have a few BSD servers.  OpenBSD is my favorite, because they like to keep stuff simple.

Plan 9 has been a great inspiration on how to work with computers, I run plan9ports on most machines.

Current favorite apps?

I use the not very well-known window manager cwm(1) from OpenBSD.  I despise so called “desktop envionments”.  Just give me a few shells (I use the Z shell heavily, usually in urxvt) and editor windows.  I do lots of things in Emacs.

Small picture for your Workplace?

Imagine a cluttered desk with a small notebook on top.  It mostly looks like that, nevermind where I work right now.

You can have a look at a typical screenshot:

Name something that has inspired you recently?

I recently picked up Erlang again, which I last used a few years ago. It is a fascinating language and development environment.  I was productive immediately, and it’s so easy to interactively develop with
it.

What do you prefer? Freelance work or full time employment?

Since I’m a student, freelancing on the side is the way to go.

What are your goals for 2011?

I want to finally finish my bachelor thesis!