About

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I’m Marcel Dierkes, a software developer from Germany.

This is my personal website about all the technical things I like and about general topics that interest me.

What I Do For Work

During the day I’m an iOS developer. I have been developing for Apple platforms as a hobby since around 2010 and professionally since 2014. The iPhone and iPad really shaped my excitement for iOS and macOS app development. I worked with Objective-C, C, C++ and Swift in the POS, healthcare and mobility sectors since then. But it doesn’t usually stop there and I build tooling, automations, CI/CD setups with shell scripts, Makefiles and various build systems.

Before that I was a web developer and I got a bachelor’s degree in applied computer science.

My Interests

Cocoa, UIKit and Objective-C were – in my opinion – the best development environments I ever worked with. Although this is slowly changing as I broaden my field of work to more multiplatform and open source development. More recently I became interested in building cross-platform solutions that are not tied to any specific OS, GUI toolkit or platform language to ensure longterm sustainability.

Open Source software is an important part of my developer toolset and my longest running project is the macOS app KeepingYouAwake, that I develop and maintain since 2014.

What Hardware And Software Do I Use?

For work I exclusively use a MacBook Pro 14" (M2 Pro) for iOS development. On the personal side I switch between my Macs and Linux machines frequently for gaming, development and general computing.

My mobile devices are all Apple devices. I trust them because of their security and reliability: iPhone Air, iPad mini (6th Generation) and Apple Watch (Series 11).

I write about how I grew up with computers here.

Feel free to get in touch.