---
title = "About Horst Mustermann"
slot = "about-body"
page_scope = "about"
description = "Software engineer with 12+ years building distributed systems, developer tooling, and open source software."
---
## The Long Version
I got into programming by breaking things — first a calculator in BASIC, then progressively more interesting systems. That curiosity about *how things actually work* has never left.
For the past twelve years I've worked at the intersection of systems programming and developer experience. That means I care equally about the binary that ships and the workflow that produced it.
My deepest expertise is in distributed systems: consensus algorithms, event sourcing, eventual consistency, and all the ways that networked computers fail in interesting ways. I've designed and operated systems handling tens of thousands of events per second, and I've been paged at 3am when they didn't behave.
More recently I've been pulled into the Rust ecosystem. There's something philosophically satisfying about a language that makes the machine's constraints explicit — the borrow checker isn't fighting you, it's helping you see what you were about to get wrong.
## What I Value in Software
**Correctness before cleverness.** A system that behaves predictably in failure scenarios is worth far more than one that's technically impressive but breaks under load.
**Explicit over implicit.** Hidden state is where bugs live. Good systems make their assumptions visible — in types, in documentation, in the architecture itself.
**Developer experience is product.** The internal tools a team uses shape how fast it can move. Investing in the workflow is investing in the output.
## Beyond the Terminal
When I'm not at the keyboard I'm usually hiking, cooking elaborate weekend meals, or over-engineering some part of my home network. I also give occasional talks at local meetups — see the speaking section for recent ones.