Hi, my name is
Dennis Trautwein.
Nice to meet you!
I'm a physicist working as a software engineer based in Switzerland currently specializing in peer to peer systems as part of a PhD endeavour.
About Me
Hi! I'm Dennis, a software engineer based in Switzerland who enjoys building things that live on the internet and also power the internet.
Shortly after graduating from Christian-Albrechts-University, I joined the engineering team at freiheit.com where I developed and successfully launched the Mercedes Benz Mobile SDK. Then I became an industrial PhD candidate and joined OriginStamp in Switzerland to explore peer to peer systems in trustless environments.
Currently, I'm also funded by Protocol Labs with a two year PhD Fellowship for studying node heterogeneity in Peer-To-Peer networks, particularly IPFS and Filecoin.
Here are a few technologies I’ve been working with recently:
- AWS
- Kubernetes
- ArgoCD
- Golang
- Terraform
- Protobuf/GRPC
- libp2p
Where I’ve Worked
Research Engineer @ Protocol Labs
Sep 2022 - Present
- Study, design and propose measurement methodologies to quantify the healthy operation of libp2p protocols for IPFS, Filecoin and other platforms.
- Propose metrics that help quantify the performance of networking processes and protocols.
- Validate design proposals through simulation experiments and/or proof-of-concept distributed, large-scale testbed, or real-world implementations.
- Contribute and lead implementation of protocol optimizations.
Industrial PhD candidate @ OriginStamp AG
May 2020 - Present
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Architecture lead - Bootstrapped Kubernetes infrastructure based on EKS, ArgoCD, Terraform and GitHub-Actions.
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Conducted training sessions for various topics around DevOps, Coding and general software engineering for internal and external partner companies.
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Work in a micro-service environment powered EKS in the AWS cloud.
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Worked full stack along an Angular PWA, Hugo static site, Spring Boot micro-services, Ansible VM provisioning.
Software Engineer @ freiheit.com
Jul 2018 - Apr 2020
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Write modern, performant and maintainable code for an industry-changing project of a large automotive corporation
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Work in a micro-service environment powered by Terraform and Kubernetes in the Azure cloud.
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Contribute to protoactor-go, an open-source Go library that provides "ultra fast distributed actors for Go"
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Maintain a CI/CD pipeline based on Jenkins and Spinnaker - also experimented with canary deployments
Web/Mobile Developer - Working Student @ weluse GmbH
Jan 2017 - Jun 2018
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Built and lead an ongoing web application project for property managers
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Developed and maintained code for in-house and client websites primarily using React, Redux, Flow, Sass and also PHP, Ruby on Rails
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Manually tested sites in various browsers and mobile devices to ensure cross-browser compatibility and responsiveness
Research Assistant @ CAU Kiel
2017
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Performed frequency analyses of large image sets from a photoemission electron microscope in Python using packages like NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib and Pandas.
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Developed an automation programme which controlled the said microscope and its peripherals in Java.
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This programme utilised a RS232 serial interface of the microscope and a plugin interface of a camera controlling programme.
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The tool is still heavily in use and helps accellerating scientific discoveries of the current researchers
Software Developer @ TouchTech Labs
Mar - Sep 2016
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Developed and shipped highly interactive web applications for a diverse set of clients
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Worked with a variety of web technoligies including HTML, CSS/Sass, Javascript, jQuery, Ruby on Rails, AWS.
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Interfaced with clients and held product presentations
iOS Developer Intern @ TouchTech
July - Mar 2016
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Developed and shipped a promotional iOS application for the horror movie The Dead Room using Objective-C, Bolts, AFNetworking
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Developed and shipped an iOS applications for tracking the performance of employees using Swift 2.3 leveraging third-party and internal APIs - Demo-Video
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Interfaced with clients on a weekly basis and both apps were developed solely on my own
Some Things I’ve Built
Featured Project
Mercedes Benz Mobile SDK
As part of my work at freiheit.com I built the backend part of the real time event supply for the Daimler Mercedes Me App. A status update of a vehicle (like opening a door) or sending a command to the vehicle goes through my code.
- Go
- protobuf/GRPC
- Terraform
- Kubernetes
![Mercedes Benz Mobile SDK]()
Featured Project
Nebula Crawler
Award winning libp2p DHT crawler that monitors among many other things the liveness and availability of peers. A presentation of some results and their impact can be found here on YouTube.
- Go
- libp2p
- Networking
![Nebula Crawler]()
Featured Project
PCP - A Fully Decentralized Peer-to-Peer File Transfer Tool
Peer Copy is a decentralized, peer-to-peer file transfer tool based on libp2p. It allows any two parties that are either both on the same network or connected via the internet to transfer the contents of a file based on a particular sequence of words. I published a paper about it at IFIP '21.
- Go
- libp2p
- Networking
![PCP - A Fully Decentralized Peer-to-Peer File Transfer Tool]()
Featured Project
Image-Stego
Steganography-based image integrity via embedded Merkle tree nodes into image chunks so that each chunks integrity can be verified on its own. This enables highlighting exactly which areas of a photograph were modified.
- Go
- Merkle Tree
- Steganography
![Image-Stego]()
Talks
Publications
- Design and Evaluation of IPFS: A Storage Layer for the Decentralized Web (SIGCOMM '22, August 22-26, 2022, Amsterdam, Netherlands)
- zbMATH Open: API Solutions and Research Challenges (DISCO '21 co-located with JCDL '21)
- Introducing Peer Copy - A Fully Decentralized Peer-to-Peer File Transfer Tool (IFIP Networking Conference '21)
- Angular Distribution of Charged Particles in the Atmosphere- Results of the ADAM Experiment on BEXUS 19 (22nd ESA Symposium on European Rocket and Balloon)
Other Side Projects
view the archiveShamir CLI
A CLI frontend for Hashicorp Vault's Shamir's Secret Sharing implementation.
lassunsreden.ch
I've built the business homepage for lassunsreden.ch. A simple landing page built with Hugo and Bootstrap.
Groundhog
Groundhog is a telegram bot to track your habits and save it to Google sheets. It sends three reminders each day that you can answer right in telegram.
Hashicorp Vault terminal UI
A prototype of a terminal UI that allows browsing through Vault's secret hierarchy tree. You can find a demo GIF at the PR to the official Hashicorp Vault Repository.
WalterHilft
I was one of the leading developers for an ongoing web application project for property managers. It stream lines the heat costs billing procedure to just a couple of clicks.
Repulsion
Repulsion is a tiny iOS game ajar to flappy bird. Read more about it on Ray Wenderlich where it got featured on the monthly readers app reviews. It is not on the AppStore anymore because I did not update it since 2016.
What’s Next?
Get In Touch
Although I’m not currently looking for any new opportunities, my inbox is always open. Whether you have a question or just want to say hi, I’ll try my best to get back to you!
Say Hi