About me
Hello there! o/
I'm Alexandra (also known as DasXandra), a Keyboard Cowgirl, Maker, and Hacker from Ulm, Germany.
Early days (2010-2018)
The first experiences I had with computers were mostly with the amazing Willy Werkel (Gary Gadget) games on a Ruby Red iMac G3 that I found on the side of the road while walking home from elementary school at age 9.
This sparked my interest in computers while showing me that slow, 'old' or even 'ancient' hardware can be more fun, useful, and powerful than people wanted to make me believe.
Until around 7th grade I mostly just used and collected computers, fooling around, experiencing the past, and seeing how optimized Software makes a difference in speed and usability.
(for example: the Chimera/Camino browser for PowerPC Macs)
This changed after I received a new in box Sony Xperia Play running Android 2.3, the version of Android was quite outdated, even in late 2016. However, I discovered that there was a thriving Android community that created custom ROMs and hacks. This piqued my interest and led me to:
- running Ubuntu 14.04 on my iMac G3
- would recommend something faster than a 400MHz G3 with only 320MB of Ram :,)
- learn the basics of programming in C
- root my phone, and build CyanogenMod 9.1 for my Xperia Play
- building CM9.1 on 32-bit PPC Linux was an adventure.
- realize that I want to do more stuff with computers, not just use them
The follwing time I mostly experimented with Arduinos, some simple C programming, this is until I discovered the shackspace in 2019.
2019
This year deserves its own section. I found the shackspace through a friend, which led me down a path of visiting many maker and hackerspaces across Germany and Europe, such as :
I met many new people, friends and lost my fear of traveling while doing so.
I learned many new things about *nix operating systems, hacking, programming, software development, embedded hardware, making, and myself.
This is also the year I started to medically ✨🏳️⚧️transition🏳️⚧️️️✨
Where I am now
Now you can find me in one of the following places most of the time :
- Entropia
- Experimenta
- shackspace
verschwoerhaustemporaerhaus- CCC events in Europe
Doing one or more of the following :
- electronics
- microcontrollers
- analog
- digital
- software development
- mainly in Zig
- sometimes in C/C++
- administrating my machines
- „I use FreeBSD BTW.“
- making hardware do as I wish
- hardware necromancy
- CNC'ing stuff
- analog and digital photography
- sewing
- woodworking
- furniture or project enclosures
- learning chinese
- being bad at web design.