Hey, it's me!

The Full Story

My first computer was a Vobis Highscreen Big Tower with a 16 MHz 386SX. I managed to get Windows 95 running on it, which took 50 out of the available 60 MB of disk space. Booting Win95 took around 30 minutes on that machine; it was glorious. Eventually I fried it when I flipped the voltage switch from 230V to 115V while it was running.

I fried a few more computers, but I also helped fix some. I learned how to configure routers and set up networks before I had internet access, because we used to have print magazines with articles about how to do that, and people paid money to get them online.

As a kid living up on a mountain with no internet, the only programming language I had access to was QBASIC because it came pre-installed with the OS, including the documentation. I learned to program by brute force, typing in commands and seeing what happened. The first game I wrote was an Asteroids clone, but I didn’t know what arrays were, so all asteroids had hardcoded names in the program. Later, I wrote a table tennis game for two players with nice graphics and double-buffering, but when I reinstalled the operating system, I forgot to save it to a floppy disk. Those were the days.

This is also around the time I started to have my own blog. I’ve been maintaining some form of personal website for more than 25 years now. Some of the different versions are still available on GitHub and the Internet Archive.

My first Linux distribution was Aurox, as it came with one of these magazines. After that, I was a proud Slackware user for a few years and managed to break my kernel and boot loader on a regular basis, as was customary in those days. The first version of my penguin logo dates back to that time, too.

My first company was a small software consultancy that I founded with my friend Johannes. We fixed hardware, created websites, and wrote simple applications for mid-sized companies in the region.

Later on, I studied Computer Science at Universität Bayreuth and started to contribute to open-source software. After graduating, I went on to work as a backend engineer at trivago, where I mostly dealt with website performance and scaling our backend systems.

I learned many programming languages throughout the years, but ever since I learned of Rust in 2015, I’ve been using it as my main programming language. In 2021, I founded corrode, a consulting company that helps teams make the most of Rust.

I usually go by my handle mre on the internet, which is short for “Matthias Richard Endler”. You can find me on Mastodon, Twitter, LinkedIn, and GitHub. Here is a list of my public speaking engagements.

If you wish to get in touch, feel free to schedule a meeting or send me an e-mail.

Active Projects / Companies

• Rust in Production: A podcast about companies using Rust in production.
• Open Podcast: An open platform for podcast analytics.
• lychee: A fast link checker written in Rust.
• Analysis Tools: An open comparison platform for static/dynamic code analysis software, listing 600+ tools.
• Idiomatic Rust: A peer-reviewed collection of articles/talks/repos that teach concise, idiomatic Rust.

Previous Projects / Companies

• codeprints: A shop for framed art prints of your Github contributions (co-founder, since acquired).
• Hello, Rust!: A YouTube channel about the Rust programming language (discontinued).

Open Source

As of today, I have started more than 100 open source projects. Here’s a list of the more popular ones: