Hello, I don’t like to talk about myself. Nevertheless, every visitor should get the possibility to get an approximate picture about me, my experiences and my know-how, so that maybe my choice of topics, opinions and other statements can be better understood.

I was born in the 1980s as part of a large family and grew up in a small town in East Westphalia (Germany). Besides the disadvantages of having older siblings, it also had advantages. One of them was that I already had access to a Commodore C64 in kindergarten and was thus able to discover my passion for computers early on, especially for that time, through video games.

During my school time I started programming besides gaming. My first steps were HTML, CSS, Logo and QBasic. In high school PHP, C and SQL followed. But I didn’t spend all my time at school in front of the PC, I also made friends that last until today, even if we live hundreds of kilometers apart and therefore rarely see each other. In addition, I also met my now wife during this time. I spent a total of 15 years in various types of schools before starting the “serious” part of my life as an IT assistant with a technical college entrance qualification. After that, the interplay between (further) education and “work” began for me:

• Dual apprenticeship as an IT specialist, specialization: application development (2,5 years)
• Consulting across Germany, mostly in the Unix-/Linux-Operations sector (~2 years)
• Bachelor of Science in Computer science (3,5 years)
• Software Developer, mostly as a backend developer (~3.5 years)
• Master of Science in Computer Science (1.5 years)
• Brief excursion into research (2.5 months)
• Software Developer

There were other stations and also during the study I worked partly, but I hope that my meandering can be recognized. Something that becomes a problem for me every now and then is that I would prefer to acquire deeper knowledge about all areas of computer science. As a result, it happens from time to time that I go down the rabbit hole when doing research and it takes me a long time to resurface. My professional focus has remained in software development over the years, but since I have been using Linux almost exclusively privately (also for gaming) since about 2010, my knowledge in this area is also evolving. When it comes to programming languages, I’ve noticed over the years that the compiler is my friend and therefore I’ve become a big proponent of statically typed languages.

Now an attempt to describe myself in bullet points:

• Languages I like:
  • SQL
  • Kotlin
  • Elm
  • Haskell
  • Rust
  • C#
  • Java
• Operating systems I like:
  • GNU/Linux, currently especially in the form of Arch Linux and EndeavourOS
  • All UNIXes, where root is really root (I mean you, MacOS)
• Software I like:
  • Open Source Software 😉
• Video games I like:
  • California Games
  • Sid Meier’s Pirates!
  • Mafia (C64), even if I got know it as Al Capone Jr.
  • Die 4te Offenbarung, when the old community still exists (before 2005)
  • Ultima Online (misc. FreeShards)
  • World of Warcraft (only up to and including TBC)
  • Quake series, in particular Quake 3 Arena (including CPMA)
  • Doom series, especially Doom (2016)
  • Monkey-Island series
  • Point&Click adventures by King Art, first and foremost The Book of Unwritten Tales
  • Diablo series, especially Diablo II including Lord of Destruction
  • Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice
  • Hunt: Showdown
• Films I like:
  • Hackers
  • Matrix film series
  • Inception
  • The Illusionist
  • The Prestige
  • Equilibrium
  • Ocean’s film series
  • Shutter Island
  • Pan’s Labyrinth
• Authors I like:
  • Markus Heitz
  • Richard Schwartz
  • Joe Abercrombie