Welcome to my GitHub profile README. My civil name is Martin Baláž and I can be often find under the alias @sesquideus. Everywhere.

• I am an astronomer and software engineer by both profession and passion. I like to think I am carefully balancing between physics, applied mathematics and programming.
• Currently I work as a pipeline developer for METIS, Mid-Infrared ELT Imager and Spectrograph in the A*V team at the University of Vienna.
• In my semi-free time I am also the software lead of the AMOS project at Comenius University and I cannot get myself to quit working for the education NGO Trojsten.

Most of my previous work revolved around meteors, as I did both my masters and PhD in meteor science.

In my semi-free time I am still the software lead of the AMOS project, a network of automated meteor camera stations.

• ASMODEUS or All-Sky Meteor Observation Detection Efficiency Simulator, a virtual meteor observatory that was used in my master thesis for determination of meteoroid flux and selection bias effects. Python, also ported to C++/Qt
• AMOS client, a persistent C++/Qt application that controls the collection of meteor data at remote stations. It communicates with a custom board over serial port, starts and stops the camera and sends periodic heartbeats and collected data to the central server C++/Qt
• AMOS sightings, a script for local backup of meteor data and reencoding videos Python
• AMOS server, the central website which manages the meteor sighting database and housekeeping data Python/Django
• vasco, a virtual all-sky corrector plate for all-sky cameras Python/PyQt6
• ubi, a kernel density estimation framework for arbitrary metric spaces, which was the core of my dissertation thesis. There it was used to find the probability density function of incoming meteors. C++

Since the beginning of my bachelor's I have been a part of the NGO Trojsten, which organizes multiple competitions and events concerning mathematics, physics, programming and puzzle hunts. I have authored over 200 problems for the correspondence seminar FKS and the physics competition Náboj physics, and contributed to the backend as well.

• dgs is an automated document compositor / templating system. Written in XeLaTeX, make and Python, it makes heavy use of jinja2 templating and pandoc. Also used to write and publish handouts and homework sheets for students in a highly structured form.
• multiple simple simulations that were used in correspondence seminars
  • gravity, a 2D solar system simulator (in Slovak) JavaScript
  • phase-portraits, a simulator of simple physical systems and their phase portraits (in Slovak) JavaScript
  • rocket, a 2D simulator of a rocket (in Slovak) JavaScript
  • spectre, a simulator of electromagnetic spectra (not yet finished) JavaScript

• argparsedirs, a microscopic enhancement to argparse that enables using directories as inputs Python
• physics-fields, a package for evaluating scalar and vector fields Python
• scalyca, a minimalistic framework for console applications Python
• astroworkshop, a simple website for the annual Astroworkshop for students at Comenius University Python/Django