Eric Heinemann
Systems Engineer for NixOS, infrastructure and security
About me
I'm Eric and I'm from Thuringia, the green heart of Germany. Most of my life revolves around tech. In the evenings I often vanish into a rabbit hole for hours, self-hosting new services or learning new technologies, until I notice it's the middle of the night again. Otherwise I burn off energy at the gym and in MMA, or I get out into nature. Oh, and I have a soft spot for cars and for hardware I don't really need :D
What drives me
I like to understand how things work and why they work that way. That's why Linux, that's why open source. With NixOS I found a system that fits my mindset. Everything lives in code, everything is version-controlled and reproducible, and if I break something, I just boot the previous generation.
Privacy matters just as much to me. I'd rather keep my data on my own hardware than with some corporation whose business model is me and my data. So I self-host as much as I can and move anything that doesn't run away fast enough to open source. My Asus router became an OpenWrt access point a year ago, my Ugreen NAS became a NixOS NAS, and on the go I run GrapheneOS on my phone and Espruino on a Bangle.js 2 smartwatch. Which brings us straight to the homelab.
Homelab
My homelab is my heart and soul, and the reason for most of those late nights. Right now it runs NixOS VMs on Proxmox. Terraform creates the VMs from a Debian image on Proxmox, nixos-anywhere turns Debian into NixOS, Colmena deploys my NixOS configs onto them, and the secrets sit encrypted in the repo with sops-nix, so no password is ever in plain text. Behind it is everything normal consumers pay Big Tech for, from Nextcloud and Vaultwarden to Forgejo, Prometheus, Grafana and Loki. And all of Wikipedia offline, of course, in case the internet ever goes down :D Right now I'm adding my own binary cache with a remote builder and single sign-on with Kanidm. The repo goes public soon, until then have a look around the blog, for example at how I got NixOS onto my NAS.
And I'm far from done. Next up, I want to take a closer look at Kubernetes and automate deployments with GitOps, so a single push is all it takes. Long term, Proxmox, OPNsense and the access point should make way for NixOS too, so that really EVERYTHING is reproducible and version-controlled.
Work
Professionally, I'm a systems administrator in the public sector, where I also did my apprenticeship. I take care of networks, firewalls, Wi-Fi and servers, built a complete monitoring and automation stack on my own and introduced Ansible. On the side, I worked at Applicative Systems Group, a company for NixOS consulting and training. There I looked after NixOS hosts, built a backup module with restic and set up alerting from scratch.
My first contributions to nixpkgs and the NixOS Salt Sprint in Halle showed me how much software development appeals to me too, even though my strength clearly lies in infrastructure.