TommySchmucker

Employement

I am employed part-time at Facts & Files Digital Services. The company is responsible for transcribathon.eu, a crowdsourcing and citizen science project for describing, annotating, transcribing, and georeferencing historical collections. My role involves developing and maintaining APIs (PHP and Java), databases (MySQL and PostgreSQL), and DevOps operations (Continuous Integration, Docker deployments, etc.).

Freelancing

I’m not assigned to a project at the moment and available for hire.

Personal

Currently I’m working on different personal projects in parallel:

• I am coding a FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) calculator. in JavaScript. All the existent calulators seems to be rather complex or missing details for my needs (FIRE calculator)
• Additionally I’m working on a knit designer as PWA that I can use when I design or change some patterns for my knitting projects.
• And since I’m switching my cloud stuff to a Nextcloud instance I’m programming a sync manager with TUI and CLI for Linux. It will be done in Go language, so I can learn that on the way.
• I’m making a currents and tide viewer PWA based on the french SHOM ocean surface data.
• I am constantly enhancing the UI and features of lebenuntergsegeln.de and sailingpathways.com

Technology

• Go Programming Lanuage
• LLMs and dockerized RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Genertation) systems
• Dockerized Deployments on Cloud Server Systems
• Europeana Data Model (EDM) specifications in a JSON-LD representation

Languages

• Spanish
• French
• Finnish

Other

• Eletrical systems on boats
• Knitting

Robert Jordan, The Wheel of Time – The Fires of Heaven.

Current location: Brest, Brittany, France

After three weeks in Mildford Haven, were we made new friends from Trotamar 4, we left the marina and moored at the deepwater pontoon in the bay of Dale. It was a rocky and rolly night but we wanted a early start next day to cross the Bristol channel and didn’t want to wait for the tidal gate opening in Milford Haven. In the channel the wind was good at the beginning but soon it died out and we had to motor the rest. In the morning made landfall in Padstow shortly before the tidal gate opened for us. Here we spend a good week and enjoyed the location. We originally wanted sailing direclty to South Cornwall and skip Padstow, because it is not always accessable due to the tides. But we are glad we didn’t. It was really wonderful there.

For our departure at neap tide in Padstow we had to leave the harbour beforehand; due the low water level even at high tide it could not open the tidal gate for roughly 48h. So we anchored in The Pool outside. On other tidal times part of this will just dry out. Strange feeling.
The next day at noon we raised anchor. We took an intermediate stop at Carbis Bay near S. Ives. The bay is wide and open and was heavily affected by swell so I didn’t have good night sleep and I was glad that we continued the next day for the rounding of the notorious Land’s End.
But it turned out as a journey without wind but heavy fog. The sea was flat but a long big atlantic swell rolled constantly under the boat. We just could get just a glimpe of the lighthouse of the Longships.

In Newlyn we stayded also nearly two weeks and waited for the next weather window to cross the English Channel. Newylin is the only all time reachable deep water harbour between the notorious Land’s End and The Lizards. It is a noisy fishing harbour, one of the biggest, and fisherman entering and leaving constantly, no matter the time. We were a bit of glad to leave and heading for France. We sailed through the night. At 11pm had to start the motor and motorsailed the the rest. But in the morning we got company from dolphins. For at least on hour they played around the boat. Awesome animals.

Our first harbour in France was L’Aber Wrac’h. But here we stayed just for night and sailed with a good wind the next morning directly to Brest, were we are now.