Fabian Steeg — About

I’m a programmer from Cologne, Germany. These are the things I’ve been building, sharing, and learning.

Most of the software I build is public on GitHub. For general information and links see fsteeg.com.

hbz NRW — Software Developer

Since 2012

Working on public data infrastructure, search technology, and data processing tools at Hochschulbibliothekszentrum NRW (hbz), a government service and development agency for academic libraries.

Built first production version of our web APIs for linked open library data with JSON-LD, Elasticsearch, Play, and Java in 2012–2013. Started the Metafacture IDE, an integrated data processing environment, in 2013. Built nwbib.de, the NRW regional bibliography site based on our APIs in 2013–2015. Created 2.0 versions for lobid.org, our linked data services in 2015–2018.

Sharing what we do and learn in talks (2013, 2015), workshops (2016, 2018), and papers (2016, 2018).

Learned about Design of Computer Programs and Python (Peter Norvig and others, 2017–2018), completed Reactive and Functional Programming in Scala (Martin Odersky and others, 2012–2013).

Eclipse Foundation — Contributor, Committer

Since 2007

Active contributor since 2007, committer since 2010. Contributed to the Java Development Tools (JDT), Runtime (Equinox, p2), GitHub integration (EGit), Mylyn, Scala IDE, and others.

Active committer 2010-2015 on the Zest visualization component of the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF). I integrated Graphviz DOT support, set up and maintained continuous integration with Git and Hudson, reviewed and applied contributions. Helped with the migration of GEF Zest 2.0 to JavaFX-based GEF4, recruited two new committers.

doo GmbH — Software Developer

1/2012-7/2012

Helped to launch the doo document management software server backend, based on Clojure, Java/JVM frameworks, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure.

Implemented Dropbox integration and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) deployment, contributed AWS VPC support to the open source jclouds project.

Google Summer of Code — Student, Mentor

2009, 2013

Implemented Graphviz DOT support for the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF) based on the Xtext DSL framework (2009).

Co-mentored a snipmatch editor project for Eclipse Code Recommenders (2013).

University of Cologne — Assistant, Researcher

2003-2011

Developed a collaborative digitization editor and web portal (DFG project with swiss partners, 2009-2011) based on Java, Scala, Eclipse 4, and the Play framework.

Developed parts of the API and services of Planets, a framework for digital preservation actions (EU project led by the British Library, 2008-2010, based on Java, EJB3, JAX-WS.

Taught Java programming (OOP, algorithms, data structures) and text mining (information retrieval, classification, clustering) courses (2006-2011).

Developed tools for text mining and authoring using Java, XML, SWT, Swing (2003-2008).

DIMDI — Contract Programmer

2003, 2004, 2005

Helped with Java-based web development and switching their IDE setup to Eclipse (summer jobs, federal government agency for medical data).

Web — Author, Programmer

Since 1997

Putting HyperText on the WorldWideWeb since 1997. Writing a technical blog since 2004. See also: our team blog, my ORCID profile.

Answered over 400 programming questions on Stack Overflow, in the overall top 1% of users, more than 8m people reached, most active 2009-2011.

Created or contributed major parts to articles on functional grammar, information extraction, suffix trees, and others in the German Wikipedia 2006-2008.

Participated in more than 200 algorithm competitions (now called data science competitions) since 2004 on topcoder.com, solving more than 200 problems.

University of Cologne — Student, M.A.

2001-2008

M.A. in Information Processing (major), Linguistics, Geography (minors) in 2008. Master’s thesis on machine learning for word sense disambiguation with hierarchical belief propagation.

Presented a poster about implementing linguistic notation with domain specific languages at the 12. International Conference on Functional Grammar 2006, Brazil.

First major programming project in 2002, implementing a search engine.