Paul Herrmann

About

I'm Paul Herrmann, a Computer Engineering M.Sc. student at RWTH Aachen with a focus on wireless communications and embedded systems, and a software engineer at UMH Systems in Cologne.

My interest lives where hardware meets software: how a processor actually executes code, what an operating system does between my program and the silicon, and how communication systems move bits through the air. I wrote my bachelor's thesis on uncertainty quantification for 3D object detection in LiDAR point clouds. Along the way, I've built a hydrogen-powered drone at Fraunhofer IPT, written embedded firmware for a cattle wearable on Zephyr RTOS, done technical due diligence on deep-tech startups at the VC Freigeist, and developed features for an industrial automation platform in Go.

I've been taking things apart (LEGO Mindstorms, microcontrollers, smart homes, source code, cars) since primary school, and I still do. Some of it ends up as open source on GitHub:

  • FreiPadel a self-hosted platform for discovering available padel court slots
  • CSI-Toolkit a modular toolkit for Wi-Fi Channel State Information collection, processing, and ML-based activity recognition
  • ESP32-Smart-Charge a Bluetooth-enabled charger with scheduled startup and voltage-based power management

Why this site exists

I find myself coming back to the same computer engineering questions again and again (how does a transistor work? why did Apple Silicon feel so much faster than Intel?, ...) and every time I have to piece the answer together from scratch. This site is my fix: a place where those answers are written down in my own words, from my own understanding.

It's primarily a knowledge base for myself. But knowing that friends, family, and curious strangers might read along is exactly the motivation I need to actually write things down properly. Every post builds its answer from first principles, introducing each concept before using it, and dives as deep as I find interesting. And every post says where my knowledge comes from, whether that's a course at RWTH, a hobby project, work experience, or my own reading. I polish structure and phrasing with the help of an LLM, but every claim originates in my own head and is something I understand and stand behind: nothing goes live that I couldn't explain at a whiteboard.

Get in touch

Write me at [email protected] or find me on GitHub. I'm happy about corrections, questions, and your comments.