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What is Noah Doersing?
Noah Doersing is a personal website for a German software developer and media informatics graduate based near Tübingen. It functions as a portfolio and hub for his open-source work, generative art, photography and writing. The site is a single page with sections for About, Projects, Generative Art, Photography and CV, and it links out to his blog, his bird photography site Rarefied Pixels, his Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, and his code repositories.
What you'll find there
- Projects. The page lists self-built tools and experiments, including Rammertblick, a directory of landmarks, huts and springs in the Rammert forest, and osm2svg4art, a small browser tool that turns OpenStreetMap roads around an address into a color-coded SVG for pen plotting. There's also nyum, a Pandoc-based static site generator for recipe collections.
- Generative art and photography. He describes making generative art with software and hardware, and photographing birds and other subjects.
- Blog. Called Excessively Adequate, it covers programming and adjacent topics such as infinite Bash history, adjusting macOS volume from the command line, and drawing the Sierpiński Triangle with recursive SQL and SVG.
Who it's for
This is most useful if you're a developer or maker curious about small, practical open-source projects, or if you want a concrete example of a personal site that mixes code, art and local history. Someone looking for a commercial product, a service or a company profile won't find it here.
If you want a quick sense of the author's style, start with the Projects section and follow osm2svg4art to try the tool, then read a blog post or two to see whether the technical writing matches what you're after.
What projects has Noah Doersing created?
Noah Doersing's projects span open-source tools, generative art, photography and local-history work. The main ones named on his site:
- Rammertblick — a directory of things to see in the Rammert, a forested hill range in Southern Germany: huts, springs, wayside shrines, small monuments, landmark trees and boundary stones. He describes it as combining walking, photography, coding, web design and local history, written in German, intended for release as a static site under an open license, with a landing page already live.
- osm2svg4art — a small single-page app that takes an address, pulls nearby roads and paths from OpenStreetMap via the Overpass API, and converts them into a colour-coded SVG made for plotting on an AxiDraw pen plotter. It began as a pen-plotter postcard exchange project.
- nyum — a simple static site generator built on Pandoc, aimed at people who want to publish a personal recipe collection.
- Excessively Adequate — his blog, where he writes about programming topics such as infinite Bash history, changing a Mac's system volume from the command line, drawing the Sierpiński Triangle with recursive SQL and SVG, and isomorphisms between integers and composite types in Haskell.
- Rarefied Pixels — his photography site, mostly birds and similar subjects.
- Generative art — software- and hardware-based work, including the animation featured at the top of his site.
He also mentions contributing to OpenStreetMap and maintaining open-source code, with current projects on Codeberg and older work on GitHub.
If you want to judge which is most useful to you: pick nyum if you want a lightweight Pandoc-based recipe site, osm2svg4art if you own a pen plotter and want quick artwork from a location, and Rammertblick if you are interested in a place-based, openly licensed guide to a specific German forest region.
How can I use osm2svg4art to convert OpenStreetMap data into SVG art?
Open osm2svg4art as a small single-page web app: you give it an address, it queries OpenStreetMap's Overpass API for nearby roads and paths, then renders them as a colour-coded SVG. The output is designed for pen plotting on an AxiDraw, so it is vector line work rather than a raster picture. Noah Doersing built it for a pen plotter postcard exchange, which tells you the intended scale: a compact, stylised map of one place, not a full cartographic export.
A practical workflow
- Pick an address with recognisable street geometry — a home, a venue, a junction you know well. Dense, irregular street patterns read better as art than a single straight road.
- Enter it in the tool and let the Overpass query return the surrounding roads and paths.
- Check the SVG before plotting. Open it in a vector editor or browser and look at line density, overlaps and whether the frame crops anything you wanted.
- Recolour or restyle in the editor if the default palette does not suit your pen colours or paper.
- Send it to the plotter, or keep it as a digital SVG.
What to decide before you start
| Decision | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Address or area | Determines which roads and paths are fetched; a meaningful location makes a better gift or keepsake |
| Line weight and pen | Thin pens suit dense networks; heavy pens can merge close parallel streets |
| Colour coding | The tool's colours distinguish road types, but a plotter is limited to the pens you load |
| Cropping | A tight frame around a familiar junction usually looks more deliberate than a wide sprawl |
| Output size | Postcard scale is the original use case; larger plots expose gaps and stray geometry |
Limits worth knowing
The app depends on OpenStreetMap data through Overpass, so coverage and tagging quality vary by location. It returns roads and paths, not buildings, terrain or labels, so the result is abstract line art rather than a readable map. If you want a different visual language, the same data can be reworked in a vector editor, or you can explore OSM tooling directly at OpenStreetMap. For plotter-specific preparation and hardware context, AxiDraw covers the machine side.
A useful next step: try one address you know intimately, plot it small, and judge whether the street pattern is still recognisable at that size. If it is, scale up; if not, choose a denser or more distinctive location.
What is Rammertblick and when will it be released?
Rammertblick is Noah Doersing's in-progress directory of things to see in the Rammert, a forested hill range in Southern Germany near where he lives. It gathers the kinds of small landmarks he encounters on long walks — huts, springs, wayside shrines, small monuments, landmark trees and boundary stones — and presents them in German as a static site under an open license. It combines his interests in walking, photography, coding, web design and local history.
On timing, the page describes the project as "pending release" and suggests it may be mostly complete around mid-2026, framed as a guess rather than a fixed date. A landing or teaser page is already live, so you can look at that now and treat the full directory as something to check back on later. If you are planning a trip around it, use the teaser as a signal of scope and coverage rather than a finished guide, and expect the German-language entries to be the main content once it launches.
What does Noah Doersing write about on his blog Excessively Adequate?
Noah Doersing describes Excessively Adequate as a blog about "programming and adjacent subjects." The topics he names are mostly practical, tool-level computing problems rather than industry commentary:
- Shell and system configuration — for example, infinite Bash history and adjusting a Mac's system volume from the command line.
- Programming technique with an unusual twist — drawing the Sierpiński Triangle using recursive SQL and SVG.
- Type theory and functional programming — isomorphisms between integers and certain composite types in Haskell.
The through-line is small, self-contained technical puzzles, often solved with an unexpected combination of tools. That makes it most useful to programmers who enjoy learning a trick they can adapt, rather than readers looking for tutorials, product reviews or career advice.
A practical next step: if you want to gauge whether the blog suits you, start with the Sierpiński Triangle post. It is the clearest signal of the style — a familiar mathematical object approached through database queries and vector graphics — and it will tell you quickly whether you enjoy that kind of cross-domain problem solving before you commit to reading the rest.
The same author's wider work follows a similar pattern of small, personal tools: his recipe-collection static site generator nyum and osm2svg4art, which turns OpenStreetMap data into plotter-ready SVG art.
What is nyum and how does it work as a static site generator?
Nyum is a static site generator built for one specific job: turning a personal recipe collection into a website. It is powered by Pandoc, the document converter, and the project has been maintained since 2021. It appears on Noah Doersing as one of several open-source projects alongside generative art tools, an OpenStreetMap-to-SVG plotter, and a local-history directory.
How it fits together
The typical static-site pattern applies: you keep your recipes as plain source files in a folder, run the generator, and it produces a set of finished HTML pages you can host anywhere. The distinguishing choice is Pandoc as the conversion engine. Pandoc already understands many input formats and produces clean HTML, so nyum inherits that flexibility instead of asking you to write content in a bespoke template language.
For a recipe collection, that matters more than it sounds. Recipes are mostly structured text — a title, a yield, an ingredient list, numbered steps, maybe a note about oven temperature — with occasional images. A Pandoc-based pipeline lets you write those in a lightweight markup format and still get consistent output, and it keeps the source readable years later without a database or admin panel in the way.
Who it suits
- Someone with an existing pile of recipes in text files, notes apps or documents who wants a browsable site rather than a folder of printouts.
- Tinkerers comfortable running a command-line tool and editing files, since there is no hosted dashboard.
- People who value portability — plain files plus a static output mean no lock-in and cheap or free hosting.
It suits these users less well if you want to add recipes from a phone, need multi-user accounts, or expect automatic nutrition calculations and shopping-list generation; those are application features, not something a Pandoc-driven generator provides by default.
A practical first step
Pick five recipes you actually cook, convert them to the source format nyum expects, and generate the site locally before committing your whole collection. That small test tells you whether the markup feels natural and whether the output pages are pleasant to browse on a phone propped up in the kitchen — the setting where a recipe site either works or does not. If you would rather see the broader landscape first, Static Site Generators catalogs alternatives, and Pandoc documents the conversion layer nyum relies on.
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