Hi everyone! I’m Nico, a tech enthusiast with a passion for diving into the ever-changing world of code and innovation. I’m excited to finally (re)launch my personal website and this blog. In the future, this is the place where I’ll be sharing my experiences, projects, and insights on everything else that I consider mildly interesting.

“Website Under Construction” – The default user experience on nrausch.com for the past few years.

A New Look, a New Chapter

While my website’s maintenance notice was almost declared a historical landmark, this release marks a fresh start for nrausch.com. I really wanted to create a space to showcase my projects and my knowledge with the community. While rebuilding this site from scratch, I took the chance diving into some very cool technologies emerged recently. This is the first project where I was able to go bleeding-edge with the newest features of Angular 18:

This website is a signal-component-based, zone.js-less app, fully server-side rendered with very granular modularity and hydration. Also, for the design I dived deeper into WebGL, modern CSS3 and browser features such as view transitions, color-contrast and animating CSS variables. 🤯

Feel free to take a coffee break after reading the preceding paragraph, you definitely deserve it. If that sounds interesting to you, though, stay tuned – probably this blog will be for you!

Who am I? What am I doing?

By day, I work as a technical consultant and DevOps Engineer at PROMATIS. There, I design and implement custom solutions for enterprises based on Oracle services. But my passion for technology extends far beyond the office… For example, I contribute to several open source projects and their ecosystems. Angular and discord.js are two of the most famous, which I also use day-to-day in my personal software projects. Read my post about ngx-function-expression to learn more about it. Currently, I’m also looking into the blockchain world. Recently, I built a webapp to automatically track my staking earnings on the Enjin Blockchain for tax reporting. I’m always looking for new technologies, challenges and learning opportunities. Especially, I try to build automations all the boring tasks I don’t want to do manually.

Oh, and by the way, I’m one of the people behind KIT SC eSports, the title-winning machine university esports club from my hometown, Karlsruhe. In addition to my official position in the management board, I’m managing all the technical stuff over there. We have a fully custom-built website and club management software, where I contributed most of the features and design. Also, there are many tools used by our members every day, such as TeamSpeak, Discord, GitLab, OwnCloud and so on.

Why “Hello World”?

“Hello World” is a simple program, but it holds immense significance for us programmers. It marks the beginning of a journey, the first step into a world of endless possibilities. Similarly, this website is a new beginning for me, and hopefully just a version 1.0 to build on for a long time.

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

Laozi

Let’s Connect!

I’m excited to embark on this journey with you all! You can subscribe to new blog posts using the RSS Feed. Don’t worry if you’re clueless about it, it’s like trying to decipher hieroglyphics for the digital age. In that case, don’t hesitate to reach out on my social media profiles. They are linked at the bottom of every page. Don’t bother to ask any questions and feel free to share my posts if you liked them.

Thanks for reading! ❤️

Okay, one more Fun Fact

I actually didn’t touch this website for the last six years – yep, really! But why now? Actually, there was a quite interesting trigger to finally build my portfolio.

For the past few years, I’m also managing a mail server for most of my personal projects. First, I used Postfix/Dovecot on my Debian server for quite a long time. With my recent migration to a whole new rootserver I switched to docker-mailserver. It’s a nice open source collection of all the email tools I needed, and a breeze to setup.

If you ever managed a mail server, you probably know how hard it is to make your mails “secure enough”. Receiving servers should be able to accept them without eagle eyeing you for the rest of your life. So I took some measures: First, I implemented several protocols such as SPF, DKIM and SRS. Then, I studied white- and blocklists, making sure that my IP and domain are considered ham. I even implemented a spam detection service and further hardened my firewalls, to be really sure. I was feeling pretty confident – and all the email clients I use (especially Gmail and Proton) were on my side.

Why do you do this to me?

However, what I didn’t expect is that german email providers don’t really care about all that stuff. But what else?! After some back and forth, I found the reason. My personal website, which is also the domain name of my mailserver, had no legal notice.

“What?!” you may ask. Apparently, putting a random name and address on a website would be worth more than all those well-thought authenticity protocols. Sure. So, here it is. I hope you like it, T-Online.

Emails… Maybe they’re worth their own rant at some point.