About

Hi, I’m Karl Ostendorf.

I’m a software engineer living in Osnabrück, Germany, originally from Chicago and shaped by more than 20 years in a small farming community in the German countryside.

I am a tinkerer. I enjoy self-hosting, open-source software and, and local IT solutions. These days I’m mostly experimenting with Go, TypeScript, RSS, Jellyfin, and FFmpeg.

I currently work as a software engineer at AWS. Before that, I spent a decade freelancing – an education in creating a direct connection between effort and earnings and an experience I’d recommend to almost every developer at least once.

This blog is my digital notebook: a place for technical notes, experiments, project updates, and the occasional piquant opinion on life, self-reliance, and surviving this world.