Biography

I am an R consultant working in Zurich, CH. My area of expertise is is in the area of applied machine learning, more specifically in the field of environmental modeling. I am also familiar with DevOps applications (Docker, Terraform, Ansible). Besides, I am also undertaking a PhD at the GIScience group at the Department of Geography at University of Jena related to environmental modeling.

In my spare time I like to develop programmatic solutions to simplify todays data science challenges. My standard is to work in a reproducible manner and also actively promote this philosophy in my daily work. Furthermore I enjoy writing about the Linux world, the #rstats community and other technical topics that I find interesting.

Interests

  • Statistical and machine-learning modeling
  • Reproducible research
  • Open-source development
  • Remote Sensing
  • Linux
  • Server Administration (HPC)
  • (Geo)-statistics

Education

  • M.Sc. in Geoinformatics, 2016

    Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

  • B.Sc. in Geography, 2014

    Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena

Publications

Recent Posts

Reproducibility of parallel tasks in R

Reproducibility is important. More important than ever. However, making a project reproducible is not as trivial as it sounds.
Last updated on Dec 25, 2019 9 min read R, r-bloggers, reproducibility

Using ccache to speed up R package checks on Travis CI

Introduction The problem The mlr use case The solution Code Introduction Continuous integration checking for R packages is usually done on Travis CI because the R community has established a community driven build framework for R. In case you are not aware, there are also other tools that try to simplify the CI tasks for R even more. This works great for simple checking of small R packages but once it comes to packages that have a lot of dependencies, developers sometimes run into troubles regarding build time.
Last updated on Oct 22, 2019 4 min read R, r-bloggers

Emoji support for Notion.so on Linux

Notion.so is a great tool for various tasks. I use it as a personal wiki but also for work-related notes. Unfortunately there is no native support for Linux and even though this point has been mentioned quite often by the community, the Notion team did not provide a Linux Desktop App yet. Maybe it will never be shipped. The Linux Desktop world can be evil when you have to make money selling applications.
Apr 7, 2019 4 min read Arch Linux, Linux

i3wm: Introducing my Linux desktop setup

Introduction The advantages of i3wm The disadvantages of i3wm My I3wm setup Introduction After switching from Windows/macOS to Linux about 1.5 years ago I tried many different Linux distributions and desktop environments. I do not want to go into details why I am running Arch Linux (Manjaro) in this post but rather talk about the “visual engine” in the background: the desktop environment. Strictly said, i3wm is not even a desktop environment but rather “only” a tiling window-manager1.
Feb 5, 2019 5 min read Arch Linux, Linux

Arch Linux setup guide tailored towards data science, R and spatial analysis

This guide reflects my view on how to setup a working Arch Linux system tailored towards data science, R and spatial analysis. If you have suggestions for modifications, please open an issue at https://github.com/rbind/pat-s_web/. Enjoy the power of Linux!
Last updated on Aug 19, 2019 20 min read R, r-bloggers, Arch Linux, Linux, Antergos
See all posts

Teaching

University of Munich

I teach within the Münchner R Kurse hosted by the Computational Stats group of LMU Munich.

University of Jena

Current

  • Geo 404: Applied Geoinformatics (WS 19/20, M.Sc.)

Past

  • Geo 404: Applied Geoinformatics (WS 17/18, M.Sc.) - TA
  • Geo 311: Geoinformatics III (WS 16/17, B.Sc.) - TA