I'm Aske, and I'm a techie, programmer, and recovering CTO.
I'm available for freelance work and consulting. I'm mainly focused on Elixir.
I enjoy building things with impact: previously that meant something that as many people as possible interacted with. Lately, that has changed to mean business impact instead. Reach out if you want to discuss a project!
Best,
Aske Dørge
I'm currently noodling away on my own businesses:
Stykka creates sustainable furniture for the future of construction. All parts in every piece of furniture have a digital twin, that enables easy repairs.
At Stykka I worked as CTO and interim CFO (2 years), dealing with everything from strategy, finance, and KPIs, while also building out the tech.
I led and build three products from scratch here:
Additionally, I took on the interim CFO role after one cofounder left. Here I learned everything from bookkeeping, contracts, auditing, balancing a very tight cash flow, and due diligence with both private investors, and public funds.
Main takeaways:Dubsmash was an early TikTok competitor in the social media video creation, sharing, and music space.
I worked as a senior developer on the backend (Python/Django) of the system with +100 mio. users. Additionally, I took on the project of building cross-platform mobile “filters” (like Snapchat/Instagram's 3D “masks”) in C++ + Swift + Objective C.
Main takeaways:Wise was an ML startup out of Berkely from a bunch of astrophysics professors, postdocs, and students.
I was building out the internal machine learning platform in Python/Flask + AWS, at a time before every cloud provider offered click-to-deploy ML pipelines, and Docker was brand new.
I spent around a decade of my life on 3D/VFX, and freelanced for a couple of years. I was fortunate enough to teach a couple of courses at one of the best schools in Europe.
Bonus: I have the World's most modest IMDB with 2x titles!
glTF is an open standard for transmission of 3D assets. It's the next big thing, as "metaverses", gaming, and XR, become prevalent across other sectors such as e-commerce, and remote work in the next 5 years.
I wrote an open source exporter in C# for the popular 3D application Rhinocerous to glTF. It's now the de-facto standard of exporting glTF from Rhino, and has been adopted by the company that creates Rhino: McNeel.
Zappa is a very popular serverless Python framework. I wrote the original WSGI server for Flask, but it was generic enough to be used by all WSGI frameworks (all mainstream Python servers conform to WSGI). It was lifted out and into the main Zappa package.
If I have no constraints, I'm mostly into Elixir/Phoenix + React for web. I like functional, strict languages like Haskell, or ML, but I'm productive in Elixir these days.
Most algorithm papers describe imperative solutions which can be hard to rewrite to functional, and even harder to analyze the complexity of. This book helps, although I find it non-trivial to apply to Elixir.
Neovim user since Onivim2 stopped development. Still working on my config though...
Down with GUIs! All hail Terminals! My terminal setup is iTerm2 + zsh + fzf.
In no particular order, I have previously worked with: Python (Flask, Django, numpy, pandas, etc), Docker, Postgres, Redis, BLAS, cuda, cuDNN, cuBLAS, Terraform, ReactJS, VueJS, git, AWS.
I can learn any language, fairly fast, because I've sniffed around almost every paradigm: imperative, functional, declarative. Profesionally I've programmed in: Elixir, Javascript, C#, Python, Swift, C++. At University for shorter or longer: Haskell, Erlang, Prolog, Matlab, R, Moscow ML, C, assembly (RISK), Java.
These days I'm mainly doing Web stuff, but I do have a little experience with Desktop, iOS, GPUs, and Python for supercomputing. I suck at kernel, and embedded programming, and don't think I will ever really learn or enjoy it.
I went to DIKU (Datalogisk Institut Københavns Universitet / Computer Science, University of Copenhagen) where I focused on algorithms and computer graphics in my bachelor, and image processing and machine learning during my master.
Sadly I have forgotten a lot of the math I toiled away over, but the good thing about having learned it once is that it's a lot easier to relearn the 2nd time. At Dubsmash I worked on a super hard problem, where I eventually opted for Kalman Filtering, which I would never have known to lookup without having learned about it at Uni. At Stykka I implemented a variation of the cutting stock problem, which I could recognize from the 1st year intro to Algorithms course. Even though I can't recall how to do Taylor Expansions or L'Hopitals rule, tasks like the above become easier when you know what to look for.
I like rock climbing and bouldering and have climbed multi-pitch routes in the Alps (hundreds of meters). The challenges are many: mind, strength, body mechanics, and logistics, all need to come together for a successful and safe ascent. Hanging 100m above the ground on a vertical mountainside, just you and your buddy is beautiful. I plan to do much more of that in the future.
I'm reading books in a variety of genres from fiction to self-betterment, from Nobel laureates to airport authors. My current favorite authors are William Gibson, Orhan Pamuk, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Jack Keourac. Like so many others I have a goal of reading more than I do. Here's my Literal profile to see more.
Over the past couple of years, I took an interest in finance and money markets. I listen to podcasts and newsletters, (my favorites are this, this, and this) and through my interim CFO stint, I've learned a lot about it from the perspective of a small company.