This Website

This website is the starting point of my digital self – a personal hub and at the same time a small experimental space. Here I share what’s on my mind, what I use or can recommend, where to find me online, and how to get in touch. Feel free to reach out if anything mentioned here interests you.

I add and adjust content and features whenever I feel like it. Texts appear in both German and English and are meant to remain as accessible as possible – with explanatory footnotes and/or further references for anyone who wants to dig deeper. This way, I capture topics that matter to me and can easily refer back to them later.

For those interested in the technical side: nrbrt.com 1 is built with the Static Site Generator 2 Hugo and uses the PaperMod theme. I write all content in GNU Emacs 3 using Org Mode 4 and export it with ox-hugo into Hugo-compatible Markdown 5. Its excellent Org Mode compatibility was ultimately the reason why I chose Hugo.

What I’m Interested In

The idea of continually discovering, learning, and understanding new things has always driven me. It’s certainly one of the reasons why I find the topic of Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) 6 so fascinating. Everything that crosses my mind, anything I hear, read, or stumble upon that might be useful or interesting now or later, goes into my digital tools – my Second Brain or Digital Garden 7. There it becomes knowledge that I can connect, revisit, and use whenever I need it.

But especially when it comes to personal content – thoughts, notes, memories, or diary-like entries – I keep asking myself how I can store all this securely without third parties being able to access or analyse it – the question of digital sovereignty 8.

I’m interested in the methods and tools that help ensure that my data is accessible only to me or to people I explicitly choose to share it with – from anywhere, yet well protected. This becomes increasingly important in times of growing authoritarian tendencies, mass surveillance, and data-harvesting corporations. That’s why I consistently prefer Open Source 9 software and self-hosted solutions or services with servers located in the EU.

Proprietary 10 or commercial products from large tech companies 11 are something I try to avoid – at least in my private life. I’m not fully there yet, but I’m steadily moving away from services like Google, Facebook, or WhatsApp. Their supposedly “free” use is ultimately paid for with personal data — and no one can really know what will be done with that data in the future.

Alongside these more technical topics, I’m also deeply interested in politics. I follow current developments, read widely, and enjoy discussing them – from a clearly left-leaning viewpoint 12. Besides digital policy issues, I care strongly about the protection of human rights and the reduction of growing and often undeserved inequalities 13.

And because I am very privileged in many ways, I donate at least ten percent of my monthly net income 14.

And yes, besides all these passions – which I could easily spend endless time on – I also live a pretty normal life. I live and work in my hometown Berlin.

  1. You can find the source code of nrbrt.com here. ↩︎

  2. A Static Site Generator is a tool that turns text files such as Markdown into ready-to-serve HTML pages. They work without a database or server-side logic, making them especially fast, secure, and low-maintenance. ↩︎

  3. GNU Emacs is an extensible and free text editor that, thanks to its customizability, is especially well suited for writing, organizing, and programming. You can find my personal configuration here. ↩︎

  4. Org Mode is an extension for GNU Emacs that lets you write notes, tasks, and texts in a structured, readable way and export them to formats like Markdown, HTML, or LaTeX. ↩︎

  5. Markdown is a lightweight text format for structured web content. Hugo uses Goldmark as its “renderer” – a tool that converts Markdown into HTML. Goldmark follows the CommonMark standard and extends it in several places. ↩︎

  6. Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) describes the personal organization, connection, and development of knowledge and ideas – a kind of “second memory” for notes, thoughts, and references. A related term is Personal Information Management (PIM), which focuses more on file and information organization. ↩︎

  7. A Digital Garden is a freely growing, interconnected collection of ideas – like a personal wiki that evolves over time. The Second Brain concept became widely known through Tiago Forte and his book Building a Second Brain (2022), in which he describes how to structure and retrieve knowledge digitally. ↩︎

  8. Digital sovereignty means keeping control over your own data, systems, and digital tools – instead of depending on corporations. ↩︎

  9. FLOSS stands for Free/Libre and Open Source Software. The “Libre” component makes it clear that this refers to freedom (e.g., to use, modify, and share source code) – not to price. Many use FOSS and FLOSS interchangeably; I prefer FLOSS because it emphasizes the freedom aspect more clearly. ↩︎

  10. Proprietary software is not freely available – the source code is not public, and usage rights are restricted by the vendor. ↩︎

  11. “Big Tech” refers to global companies that control digital platforms, infrastructure, or complete ecosystems – such as Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Bytedance (TikTok), Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Microsoft, or OpenAI. Services like X (formerly Twitter) are sometimes discussed in this context, but are not considered part of the classic Big Tech group. ↩︎

  12. Besides numerous RSS feeds 15, my daily news sources include the DLF Nachrichten app (in German), the weekly newspaper der Freitag (in German), and the British newspaper The Guardian. ↩︎

  13. For an accessible introduction to social and economic inequality, I recommend the book Unverdiente Ungleichheit by Martyna Linartas (2024) (in German), as well as the website ungleichheit.info, which provides data and analyses on wealth, poverty, and distribution in Germany. ↩︎

  14. Most of my donations go through effektiv-spenden.org to organizations that fight poverty, protect the climate, and reduce animal suffering – following the principles of Effective Altruism, a movement that directs donations to organizations that have a proven, measurable impact. A good introduction is the book Doing Good Better (2015; German edition: Gutes besser tun, 2016) by William MacAskill.

    I also regularly support:

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  15. RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is an open format that lets you subscribe to news sources and read articles from different outlets in one chronological feed – without tracking or recommendation algorithms. A related format is Atom, which is technically more modern but serves the same purpose. I use the self-hosted feed aggregator FreshRSS to collect, filter, and read RSS and Atom feeds. ↩︎