Paul Stapel

Hiya, I’m Paul! I’m a student-writer-programmer hybrid specializing in science. This website is my first public project, and I look forward to sharing more of my work in the future. Nonetheless, you can find everything you need to know about me on this page.

Reach out

If you want to reach out, you can currently contact me @ contact@paulstapel.com.

Currently working on

I am currently following these courses at Utrecht University:

• My bachelor Thesis on imposing edge of chaos behaviour on physical memristor based echo state networks.
• My bachelor Project for Citolabs working on a virtual learning environment. My main role here is implementing algorithmic architecture and research features for the researchers at Citolabs.

On the side, I work on this blog, study Mandarin and do some personal projects revolving game development. I also like exercising regularly, and try to do at least 30 minutes every day.

I also work as a part-time data analyst for Simplex, a Dutch consultancy agency that specialises in AFAS-software. As part of this job, I design and develop dashboards with Power Bi. I am now also working on some more interesting projects involving MCP servers.

Interests

These are some things I really enjoy talking/writing about. I’m always up for a chat!

• Bachelor level Physics, Maths and CompSci
• Cooking
• Life philosophy
• Books and reading
• Dungeons & Dragons
• (Indie) games
• China
• Music
• Anything I blog about
• Any of the skills mentioned below

Skills

The skills one invests their time in can tell you a lot about someone. These are things I am familiar with. I list a lot of things, but this is not meant to be a flex or part of some CV or whatever. I just like to share the things I have some knowledge of and keep track for personal reasons. In each category, skills are sorted by how comfortable I am with them.

Languages

I can speak Dutch and English proficiently, and can comprehend and (poorly) speak German and Mandarin.

• C# (Basic desktop apps, algorithmic problem solving, creating simple games)
• Python (data-analysis, scientific computing, algorithmic problem solving)
• SQL (Querying and simple database creation)
• HTML & CSS (Basic static webdev like the website you see before you)
• Bash/Shell (navigating and mutating files and directories in zsh, more comfortably every day)
• Haskell (Basic programming, creating simple games, using monads)
• C++ (In the context of hardware systems using arduino)

Tools

• Power BI (A great BI tool I use for work. Mostly like it so far, but have some gripes)
• Git and GitHub (By no means an expert, but I manage quite well)
• VS code (My IDE of choice, have used for two years now)
• Homebrew (Just very useful for mac, sometimes help people with macs transfer their setup with this)
• HUGO (The CMS used for this website, learning more every month)
• NumPy (Used for all of my scientific computing in Python)
• Snowflake (Quite familiar, have used it a bunch for data warehousing in projects)
• .NET (All of my c# projects have used the .NET framework)
• Arduino (Made some small hardware contraptions and thingamajigs)
• Monogame (Made a small game with it)
• Scikit-learn (Used in my high school paper on machine learning in drug discovery)
• NVIM (Use it for light text editing and easier navigation of files)
• Cabal (Used for creating a game in Haskell)

Non programming tools

• Mathematics (including but not limited to calculus, PDE’s & ODE’s, real and complex analysis, algebra and (abstract) topology; all at undergrad level)
• MacOS (Used this operating system for all my life, and know it quite well)
• LaTeX and Markdown (Not much to learn, use it a lot for (acedemic) writing)
• IMovie (Can make simple movies and edits for things like assignments)
• Jira (Use it for work, and know how to navigate it well enough)
• Asperite ( Disclaimer: I am very bad at pixel art :/ )

Things I’d like to learn

• Mandarin (A lot of interesting culture and literature is in Mandarin, and I’m slowly learning the language. HSK 3 currently)
• Rust (Rust sounds like an interesting language, and I’d love to learn it)
• Bevy (Part of why I’d like to learn Rust is for the bevy framework, as I love the concepts of ECS)
• Godot (For prototyping game ideas in a quick fashion)
• Blender (I like being creative I suppose)
• Some web framework (Not sure yet which one, but I like creating things, and webapps are a thing)