kuda.ai

Thoughts on programming and music theory.

hello and welcome

my name is David, I live in Switzerland. I am married and father of two wonderful girls.

I program professionally and in my free time. In February 2024, I started working at the great company Noser Engineering AG in Winterthur as a Software Engineer.

My favourite programming language is Golang. I love how the language is minimalistic and simple, how well it performs and is efficient, how fast Go code compiles, the relatively small, native and single binaries, the runtime and goroutines, and how it makes you think about concurrency and parallelism (CSP).

Besides specifically Golang, I enjoy programming in general and am interested in all sorts of languages. I think that programming a rather creative activity, and creativity is important to me. I like data structures and algorithms and think that DSA is useful in everyday programming situations.

I love the terminal, command-line interfaces and vim. Oh, yes, and I use a split keyboard, The Moonlander.

Nowadays, I do mostly DevOps and SRE type of work. Most of the code I write are yaml files with inline shell scripts. In a recent Golang meetup, someone called me a “YAML-developer”. I don’t think that he was too wrong.

In 2020, my programming journey began in Python and JavaScript. Whenever I can, I enjoy writing Go. I have written Java and C# in the past. In Switzerland, many developers love C#, so I know how to build CI/CD pipelines with C#. Reliability Engineering (or SRE) is one of my interests. I enjoy instrumenting apps and exposing their load, latencies, errors and so on on visually appealing dashboards with prometheus and grafana.

The book A Philosophy Of Software Design significantly shaped the way I think about software design. Although I don’t write application code so often at work, I still love applying the software design lens to DevOps systems. In my own words: I like making systems obvious (i.e. non complex), with an easy interface and deep functionality.

Startups a la YCombinator as in Do Things That Don’t Scale or Sam Altman on How To Start A Startup and Product Management as described by Marty Cagan fascinate me deeply.

Before programming, I worked in marketing and sales for about 10 years.

I am a self-taught programmer, and I enjoy learning how computers work. teachyourselfcs.com is a fantastic source for CS books. Currently, I am working through Computer Systems: A Programmer’s Perspective and TCP/IP Illustrated. I find the internet a fascinating invention. Currently, I am very excited about computer networking.

Privately, I use Mac. At work, I use linux (not Arch, btw :)). I tried Sway, but I couldn’t share my screen during calls. Therefore, I am now using i3.

My wife and I are part of a Tibetan buddhist community.

I make music. You can find a few covers that I published on my YouTube channel: youtube.com/@davidkuda. My main instrument is guitar. But I also enjoy singing and playing the bass. Additionally, I am a beginner at playing the piano.

Here is music I looped and which had a big influence on my musicmanship: