Hey hey đź‘‹
My name is Matthias Koch.
I’m a software engineer, centered around .NET and CI/CD.
I work as a developer advocate at JetBrains – mainly focused on Rider and ReSharper. In my spare time I’m maintaining NUKE – a popular build automation tool.
My Passion
I am passionately lazy. That’s why I absolutely love to build tools and up productivity whenever possible.
It’s nothing uncommon for me to start working on a something, only to find myself optimizing it for several hours. Don’t make me lookup XKCD on that!
Biography
I grew up in a small little town called Burg in Germany, which is very close to Magdeburg, the capital of Saxony-Anhalt. The most notable person from Burg is Carl von Clausewitz – a military theorist who actually got a nice little reference in the movie Law Abiding Citizen.
After school, I studied computer systems in engineering at the Otto-von-Guericke University Magdeburg. Electronic and automotive systems were part of my specialization. I finished plenty of short and longterm internships at various companies, including Volkswagen and the Fraunhofer IFF. I wrote my bachelor thesis about two-handed interaction techniques in virtual reality.
In 2012, I moved to Vienna (Austria) to start my first job at RUBICON and to write my master thesis about aspect-oriented programming in C#. I joined the R&D department and became a (small) contributor to the open-source project re-motion. Looking back, I’m really grateful for the influence the team and my team lead had on my skills and interest in tools and frameworks.
As a tools-fanatic, there’s no better place on earth than JetBrains. Even though I first got rejected, they eventually hired me in 2015 for their office in Munich. I started in JS/TS support *cries dynamically-typed*, but later put my hands on a couple of challenging 4-digit (old) issues that bugged me as a user prior to joining.
I always loved talking about JetBrains products, so I became a developer advocate in 2018. Being closer to our users is a great opportunity to help them being more productive. Whenever I get the chance, I try to inspire my fellow developers with my talks at conferences and meetups. Meanwhile, I live in Leipzig – very close to my heimat. Bach is my good neighbor here.
Personal
- I was a big addict for Quake 3 Arena when I was a teenager.
- Although I love cars, you’ll rather see me cycling my bike.