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I'm Alex,
a physicist from Germany. I have been coding on many machines but they tend to be rather strange. I got paid for massaging differential equations before sticking some wires together to model them. Or for writing code in logic gates. Yes, people really pay for that. Truth tables are represented in a matrix and you use matrix identities to make the circuit as short as possible. The matrices are nice, reversible, unitary and more. Unfortunately they can become quite big with increasing number of bits. Also each logic gate and each bit is affected by a lot of error/noise. And you somehow need to find a workaround.
More serious version - I have "programmed" analog computers, optimized the differential equations to use as few variables as possible to model the problem. And I have written code and algorithms for quantum computers. The corresponding job title would be quantum algorithm engineer/developer. Given that these systems are nice but come with constraints I want to be able to build my own dedcated hardware. Optimize not only the algorithms but also the hardware for the algorithms. And I always wanted to build a computer from scratch. I like old systems which I can understand into the detail. This makes quantum computing so cool. I can look at the platform used, unerstand precisely how the underlying "hardware" (lasers, photonics, whatever) work and the systems are so small that writing solutions by hand or optimizing with pen and paper can really be useful. And benchmarkng new protocols with no known scaling is also very fun.
And if I can design my own analog, digital and mixed signal systems I can build my analog computers myself and don't have to rely on some company to be able to run tests. So I am in.
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