About

Hey, it's me, Niklas.
I’m 23 years old and live since then in the beautiful city of Cologne, Germany. My interests are in riding BMX, taking photos (I’m okay but definitely no Photoshop pro). Also I started to read a lot more in the last couple of months. At the moment I'm also into programming and try to get into Javascript and Node.js.

I finished school in 2014. And had the chance to start an apprenticeship at the german location of an American soft- and hardware company. The apprenticeship was to become a Computer Science Expert for system integration. It got canceled two months before the start. Looking for an apprenticeship in July was almost impossible and ended in not having one in 2014. I then applied early for 2015 and had the opportunity to get invited by a couple of companies here in Cologne. I learnt a lot about different companies and different recruitment procedures.

The apprenticeship

At the start of 2015 I had 2 offers. One of a german system house and one of the administration at University of Cologne where I then started the apprenticeship in August. In Germany apprenticeships take ~3 years to finish. They take place in the company/institution and also at an vocational school. It’s split between 3 days per week at the company and 2 days in vocational school. The vocational school teaches the theoretical aspects e.g. how to build up a company’s network from scratch or how virtualization works etc. At the workplace one learns the practical aspects such as how a network is structured in real life situations.

That’s where the University was the perfect work place to learn because of it’s huge campus and their faculties. A part of the apprenticeship was to see lots of departments. For example in our network department. There I had the opportunity to have a deep dive in network components such as switches and routers. I enjoyed this department the most because of my mentor who had a lot of fun teaching me the basic and advanced topics of networks.

I finished that apprenticeship as a Computer Science Expert in June 2018 and was able to learn a lot in those 3 years. Thanks to my co-apprentice Moritz. We pushed ourselves to learn new topics every other month. We also created a cloud application for the apprentices at the University where work and school materials can be stored. The main motivation was to create a collaborative space that helps the apprentices. We used Nextcloud for cloud management and implemented Etherpad Lite for collaborative text creation. Both is hosted with the help of Docker containers.

The future

But wait. There’s more. I’ll stay at the University but started studies in Business Informatics in October 2018.

I wanted to start this blog to document my studies, side projects and to post tutorials and book reviews. And about tech I use or used. For example I really want to take a deeper look at hosting Node.js applications with Docker.

I have a lot of topics written down to get into and write about so stay tuned!

Thank you for reading.
Niklas