Moritz Utcke

A loaded bike resting in the snow below a prayer flag in the Nepalese Himalaya

I'm Moritz, a software engineer who took a wrong turn at a gas station in 2022. Happens to the best of us...

4 years, 132,222 km and 40 countries later I'm still following Komoot. Is this still the right way? No idea. But I've got a tent, a laptop and most days even WiFi, so what could go wrong?

01 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇮🇹🇸🇮🇭🇷🇲🇪🇦🇱🇬🇷🇲🇰🇷🇸🇧🇬🇹🇷🇬🇪🇰🇿🇺🇿🇹🇯🇰🇬🇮🇳🇳🇵🇧🇩🇻🇳🇲🇾🇭🇰🇨🇳🇱🇦🇰🇭🇹🇭🇸🇬🇮🇩🇦🇺🇺🇸🇦🇷🇨🇱🇵🇪🇧🇴🇪🇨🇨🇴🇪🇸🇦🇩🇫🇷 40

The long way round

4 years ago I rode off on a bicycle and never quite stopped. I spent countless nights in my tent, met thousands of people and spent a significant part of my life on the road.

Kilometres: 132,222
Countries: 40
Days: 1331
Photos: > 36000

Unfolding the map…

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Postcards from every country

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Things I build

Project 01

NeoWorks

Your photos, calendar and contacts, kept to yourself.

NeoWorks is my company. It stores and syncs personal data that is encrypted on your device before it ever leaves it. Photos, calendars and contacts run on it, and other apps can build on the same storage through the SDK.

Go / C++ / WebAssembly / SvelteKit / Kotlin

More about NeoWorks

01 End-to-end encrypted storage and sync: data is encrypted on your device
02 Photos, calendar and contacts apps on the web and on Android
03 An SDK and OAuth so third-party apps can store data on NeoWorks
04 One shared crypto core in C++, compiled to WebAssembly for the browser
05 Start free with 1 GB

Project 02

Gyro

A systems language that refuses the program when it is wrong.

A systems language with manual memory and explicit effects, built so that a machine can generate code in it and be caught when it is wrong. Gyro compiles to the METALS IR, a shared intermediate representation that several languages lower into, and from there to native Linux x86-64 binaries.

Go / x86-64 / Tree-sitter

source Source code

More about Gyro

import { println, Array } from "stdlib"
import { heap } from "mem"

export struct Stack {
    export capacity: i32
    items: Array<i32>
}

// A slice borrows, so the row names where the view came from.
// Without `&self` this does not compile.
export fn Stack::view(self): i32[] !{ &self } {
    return self.items.slice()
}

fn main() {
    var stack = Stack::new(16)
    defer stack.free()

    stack.push(2)
    stack.push(40)
    println("total: #{total(stack.view())}")
}

Project 03

Otter

Find something to watch. Press play. That's it.

Movies and series from all over the web in one cozy place. Search any film or show, Otter finds where it streams and lets you watch right away. It runs on your home server or NAS and on your Android phone, so your library, watchlist and progress are always with you.

Go / SQLite / GraphQL / SvelteKit / Kotlin / Jetpack Compose

More about Otter

Project 04

Drift

YouTube Music, minus the YouTube.

A YouTube Music player for desktop and Android without a server in between: every app talks to YouTube Music directly through one shared Go core. Anonymous by default, and your Spotify or YouTube Music library comes along with one import.

Go / Electron / Svelte / Kotlin

source Source code

More about Drift

Project 05

Latent

A raw photo editor, because Lightroom doesn't run on Linux.

I shoot a lot of photos and edit them on Linux, so I'm building my own editor. A C++ engine renders on the GPU, every edit is a step on a stack, and instead of pushing sliders you can also just tell an agent what to change. Still early.

C++ / CUDA / Electron / Svelte / Python

source Source code

More about Latent

01 Raw development on the GPU, every edit a step you can undo
02 Masks that pick out a person or the sky on their own
03 A library with folders, collections, ratings and flags
04 Agents edit through MCP, and a Python console uses the same API
05 Open source, Linux only for now

About me

Moritz on his loaded bike, looking down a mountain road

I'm a self-taught software engineer from Germany. I mostly do web things and compilers, and I most definitely spend too much time in front of a computer.

I occasionally dip my toes into stuff that I don't know yet. I know a decent amount of programming languages, both object-oriented and functional, as well as a good amount of x86 Assembly (I don't know how that happened either).

I love hiking, cycling, climbing and all things outdoors. I've been to 56 countries so far, over 40 of them by bicycle. I really enjoy street and nature photography, although I'm kinda bad at it.

I enjoy learning languages. I'm fluent in German and English, speak a decent amount of Spanish, get by in French and am working on my Mandarin.

Countries: 56
By bicycle: 40+
Languages spoken: 4
Learning: 中文

Programming languages

PythonGoC++Cx86-64 NASMLispRacketLuaPHPRubyTypeScriptMETAGyroBash