Sven Buschbeck
Web Technology, Project Management, Writing
Web native
Hi! I'm Sven, I work as web technology consultant, project manager, full-stack developer, and (technical) writer. I love applied technologies and believe in the power Open Source.
I still remember that massive book my brother gave for my twelve’s birthday. Back when going online involved a modem and Netscape Communicator. Thanks to the book and some funny ideas in my head as motivation, I learned JavaScript, HTML and CSS to create my first interactive websites in the mid 90s. That was the initial spark that has lead to studying computer science with a mix of graphic design and usability engineering. While hacking away on uni assignments and little open source side projects, I started working on designing and building a CMS for a small web agency to pay my bills. Being curious about living and working abroad, I then took a junior researcher position at the University of Trento in Italy in 2007. After two years, I changed to work as research engineer at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Germany. I learned a lot during that time but also realized that I’m not a 9-5er office person. Thus, in 2013, I started working as a freelance web technology consultant & developer and gathered experience in marketing, technical writing, and communications. And just before the crypto frenzy was in full swing in 2017, I started my deep dive into blockchain technology and by the end of that year, I joined the Nimiq Project as full time contractor.
Throughout my career, I’ve experienced a wide range of projects, teams, frameworks, and management approaches. I worked with privately held companies, universities, research centers, start-ups, as well as NGOs/NPOs. I learned that a) it’s important to love what you do, b) that working culture is at least as important as the software stack, c) the importance of project management is often underrated.
While moving through projects, I also moved through countries and continents and became an avid traveler with a love for refreshing my synapses by immersing into new cultures and ideas. So, during the years I lived in Germany, Italy, Greece, Australia, Taiwan, and Costa Rica and understood what a beautiful and colorful place our little planet is. It’s at the core of my personality to seek for harmony within myself, with friends, colleagues, and nature as a whole.
Skills
Web
The web is a living thing, it's changing all the time. Over the years, I've used many frameworks, languages, and meta-languages. I've basically grown up with web-development and feel at home on the web. The foundation for each project is a good idea and a powerful framework in combination with top usability/UX and clear/extensible code and infrastructure. I'm a big fan of Vue.js with Typescript, HTML/Pug, Sass/Stylus. I'm more and more dabbling my feet in Web3, bringing crypto and the web together.
Blockchain
I've entered the crypto space in 2017 and joined the Nimiq project the same year. I was working on front-end parts (e.g. fastspot.io, staking calculator) and content creation until mid-2022. During these years I've seen the good and bad of crypto and I can see the big potential that distributed ledger technologycan could bring to our society (Distributed autonomous organizations, decentralized finance, private transactions, sound money, and the power of immutability and trustlessness). And the tech (L1 and L2, L0, ZKPs, side chains, encryption, ...) is simply fascinating.
Usability
What's the point of technology if it doesn't serve the user? This question has been my guiding principle and way of thinking since university. It is the driving force behind finding the optimal trade-off between features, security, performance on the one hand and usability on the other.
Content
I have a passion for explaining technical topics to curious non-technical people. Over the years, this has driven me to develop my communication and writing skills. I enjoy writing blog posts, leading workshops, and understanding and explaining technology in one-on-one sessions.
Latest stories
Make the BSON return UInt8Arrays
Posted 9/14/2023
BSON is a great tool to serialize anything in Javascript. Including binary stuff. But why does it return a Binary when deserializing what was originally a UInt8Array. And what to do about it?
Rotki from source
Posted 2/27/2023
FYI, Rotki is a private portfolio tracker and accounting tool. Building Rotki from source using their official guide, I run into a few small issues and this is my write-up on how to solve them.
Jest and WebCrypto
Posted 2/20/2023
Surprising errors testing some crypto.subtle based functions with Jest: TextEncoder, TextEncoder, and subtle not defined?
Typescript enums 'Debug Failure.'
Posted 1/26/2023
Error messages are great, they help us find the cause of the problem. This one isn't. Not at all. If you're seening this one, check if you have an enum in your d.ts file...
Pure* CSS circular progress bar
Posted 12/6/2022
Using only variables, clipping, and transformations. *and a little helper class. ;)
Position:fixed not working?
Posted 11/11/2022
There are several CSS properties that break fixed positioning: transform, perspective, filter, and background-filter.
InnerText vs. textContent!
Posted 8/13/2019
They are not the same and why it's important to know the difference. Spoiler alert: textContent FTW!
Laptop with insomnia
Posted 8/2/2019
What to do when your laptop can't sleep? Is it teething perhaps? Bluetooth maybe?
Rendering problem with Kdenlive
Posted 7/10/2017
When Kdenlive fails to render very long video projects...
Excellent stock footage!
Posted 6/15/2015
There is a lot of great stuff out there. And some gems offer great photos and videos and are very flexible if and where you put the attribution so that it doesn't harm you layouts.