Eckardt Exposé: Meet our Junior Developer, David
David Eckardt has been with us since August 2009, but since our blog is still pretty new, and we wanted a chance to introduce him.
An animated picture of David in Mexico, processed by Fugenschnitzer
As our junior developer, David’s responsible for the development of the back-end and software basis of the services that we provide (and the upcoming projects that we’re working on). For the techies out there, “this means writing, extending and maintaining a framework of OS-level networking and database applications in a Posix environment (Linux), in the D programming language,” David explains. Basically, David develops the very STUFF our company is built on.
David is our team’s only “native Berlin guy, saying it like John F. Kennedy: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner!’” He grew up in Wedding (formerly West Berlin), between Humboldthain and Leopoldplatz. “That was in the years of division,” he recalls. “My granny’s home was a 15 minute walk from mine, she was living at Gartenstraße and from the balcony of her apartment I could look over the wall to the East and the Strip Of Death, watching the border officers relaying and the S-Bahn trains entering and leaving the East-Berlin transit railway tunnel.”
Before he started working at the labs, David studied physics at the Technische Universität Berlin, where he graduated as a physicist with a Diplom-Physiker degree. During his studies, his special field of work was solid-state physics, “in particular the measurement photonic quantum effects in nanocrystals of certain geometries at high ambient pressure and low temperature.” (Is your brain scrambled yet? Just think how lucky we are to have such a smart guy in our office!) As a student employee at the TU Berlin, Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen (machine engineering institute), he developed “a LabView-based operation and 3-D modeling system for a micro-spark erosion machining installation.” He’s also spent a lot of time along the way with various electronics and programming projects. Two years ago, inspired by a friend’s programming homework, David began to implement the Seam Carving algorithm, a content-aware image resizing algorithm present in 2007 by Ariel Shamir and Shai Avidan. He named the implementation “Fugenschnitzer.”
So why did he come to the labs?
He put it simply: “Cool people, cool work—pretty sophisticated and knowledge-stretching!”
The Fun Facts
David’s passionate hobby is designing and assembling electronic circuits, especially the old school logic integrated circuit families. (Ah, yet more technological terminology we had to look up to better understand this impressive man!)
David's battery powered clock, hanging from our office lamp
Take a look at all those tiny circuits, each one hand-placed by David himself
“I started soldering when I was eleven years old and had fun impressing the world with crazy looking self-assembled flashing light and sound generation devices,” he recalls with pride. His more recent projects include a bicycle dynamo hub mobile phone power supply, a literature ticker built of 100 shift register TTL ICs (see below), a battery driven LED wall clock built of CMOS logic counters, and (at the request of a friend) several 12V powered stereo amplifiers. (Phew, we need to take a break after just writing those, much less making them!)
When he’s not creating crazy gadgets or hard at work at sociomantic labs (believe me, he’s always working hard), you might find David bicycling through Berlin, swimming a kilometer or two at Olympiastadion in summer or Landsberger Allee in winter, or “enjoying the sunset at Neukölln’s most beautiful place, the south-east corner of the former Tempelhof airport.” This summer, you might run into him near the Ukranian-Romanian border, as he travels through eastern Europe by train and bike, from over the Tatra over the Carpathian Mountains to Odessa—sounds like a pretty good plan to us.
We are very thankful to have such an incredible guy on our team. Now we’ve just got to convince him to leave that LED clock in the office 