About

Nicolas De Coster

Nicolas De Coster

Physicist

My passion for sciences began quite early. I started disassembling broken things with a pretty simple philosophy : “If it’s already broken and intended for the trash bin, how could it go worse? Let’s try fo fix it!” (Note : It actually could go worse.)

Blackboxes are still not exactly my favorite things : my first reflex is to unmount them, dig into code and unscrew things.

I joined the Fab Lab Network in 2017, became a Fab Academy student in 2018 and I am an instructor since then. I occasionnaly give lectures about programming and debugging, with my fellows Henk and Duaa.

My favorite softwares are usually opensource and running (also) on Linux :

This is (almost) not about politics : opensource philosophy has proven to be super-efficient and reliable in the long term with limited risk of having all your work locked into a proprietary environment. The more text-based the more I like it : those are usually easier to share, rework, and they keep working in time.

I studied physics but would label myself as a mix of fake physicist, fake mathematician, fake engineer and fake manual worker. I am more officially scientific instrumentation expert for the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium.

I keep teaching at ULB (mainly Mathematics and digital fabrication with Denis Terwagne) : I don’t know any better way to make my knowledges stronger and keep in touch with young brilliant minds. I also try to remain an eternal student.