Welcome to Chemical Code!

It begins here. An empty Markdown file ready to be filled with my ramblings about computer-aided process engineering (CAPE) and programming. I have been using Github for some years now, but only now have considered to use it beyond “just” sharing code.

An introduction

Allow me to introduce myself shortly. My name is Jochen and I am a chemical engineer from Germany. After graduating from the TU Dortmund Technical University, I started my professional career at Covestro, a global player in the perfomance polymer market. Currently I am developing the process simulation landscape at Covestro and maintain the inhouse simulator VtPlan.

My passion is computer-aided process engineering, a topic that fascinates me since I started my diploma thesis in 2010. I developed simulation software at the university and continue to do so ever since, both privately and professionaly. I am a big fan of clean-code and try to continuously improve in that regard.

My Goals

So what do I want to achieve with this project? First, I want to improve my communication about my ongoing projects, so that I can more easily share finding and results from my personal research. Secondly I want to have a place where I can post my opinions on technical topics like digitalization, Industry 4.0, digital enablement and new work.

I chose Github Pages as a hosting solution for the following reasons:

1. I don’t want my articles to be behind a paywall or smudged by ads.
2. I don’t want to collect data or store user data.
3. I like open-source and the idea of openly sharing technical details to improve reproducability.
4. Minimalistic static websites are simple to maintain and modify, no dependencies, no hidden services.

My current projects

While I cannot talk much about professional projects, I still have a bit of free time to do some development and research in the evening. Currently I am developing a new, minimalistic process simulation library in .net called MiniSim on Github. The idea is to have a lightweight process simulator that can be embedded into other hosting enviroments to create ad-hoc CAPE applications.

In addition I am learning how to use Python, Jupyter and assorted packages to create data science applications on the web.

Last but not least I am interested in Docker, CI/CD and DevOps.

Written on December 19th, 2019 by Jochen Steimel