devXY's Scope

Personal Background

Over a decade ago, during my time at university, I was first introduced to Data Science. Beyond building models, generating summary tables, and creating boxplots, I quickly realized that completing projects required much more: repeating experiments, publishing results, setting up isolated environments, and regularly updating the toolset. At the time, there was no established infrastructure to support these tasks, so I took the initiative to build it myself. I installed IDEs, configured job schedulers, set up operating systems, and created containers. It became clear to me that of these elements were essential for the success and efficiency of any Data Science endeavor.

During my PhD studies (supervised by Prof. Alexander Brenning), I took on the responsibility of planning, installing, and configuring a 6-node SLURM cluster for the university’s department, designed to train Machine Learning models. This cluster remains in active use today, providing invaluable support for ongoing academic research projects. Additionally, I contributed as a core developer to the mlr3 machine learning framework in R, further expanding my expertise in the field.

Today, after years of combining expertise in both fields while leading the infrastructure/DevOps team at cynkra GmbH from 2020-2024, and deepening my focus on automation and deployment, I am eager to share my knowledge with others. Having contributed to numerous FOSS projects, I remain actively involved in the development and maintenance of public infrastructure components. This includes work on the official Gitea and Woodpecker CI Helm charts as well as the Ansible-based infrastructure setup for Codeberg. These contributions allow me to continuously get in touch with new developments and engage with the FOSS community.