About me

I'm a young hacker, Linux professional and Mac user living in a Munich suburb. I currently work as a programmer and Linux specialist for a company called Comdasys.

I'm one of those people who did nothing in their lives other than play around with computers. I got my first PC at age of 7 and started writing programms as a hobby the very same year, thanks to a friend of my father who noticed my neophilia very early (he's also the reason this homepage exists ;-).

Most of my youth I was sitting in the basement of my parents' house, writing little programms, teaching myself numerous programming languages (several BASIC dialects, Modula/2, Pascal, x86 Assembler, C, shell scripting, AWK, C++, Java, in that order ;-), more than half of which I got and get payed for programming in. Since then a lot more languages joined my repertoire (several Assembler dialects, several C-like languages, several scripting languages). Due to my computer addiction, I now have a small computer museum at home of about 20 machines (unfortunately, my first PC is missing; it was a 8088-based Epson PCe with an EGA graphics card, a fine machine at that time).

After finishing my technical diploma and the civilian service I started to study computer science on the Munich University of Applied Science, but aborted after only two semesters. This had several reasons: amongst others, one reason was that a professor explained to me that studying CS might not be the best way to go for me (I wanted to be a programmer, not some IT manager or something like that). Looking back now, he was right and I'm glad I left university this early. One of the most important reasons to leave was that I was offered a job as a programmer for Critical Reach, then under its' former name Janet Gesellschaft für interaktive Medien mbH.

After one and a half years at Critical Reach the company had financial problems like many many others in the IT industry at that time, which led to my layoff there. But I found a new employer almost instantly, Software for People AG, for which I worked in 2002 just about ten months, developing a multimedia box for the living room not unlike a PVR. Eventually they also got financial problems and got insolvent... Two of my collegues from Software for People immediately formed a new company called Be OK service group GmbH and got me on board.

At Be OK I've built a build system with which I was maintaining our own embedded Linux distribution and several embedded products like zero administration thin-clients and VPN products. I was also doing development remittance work in the embedded field there. Eventually we decided to form a spin-off (Comdasys) to focus on a product line of Voice Over IP products and since it was very successful soon one of my bosses and me changed to Comdasys (that was 2006). The company was a success and it was fun working there.

After after four years at Comdasys and over eight years in the Linux business I decided to go for a change. In the last few years the work I do changed and full-time development became scarce. I wanted that back and I found it at equinux where I'm now doing Mac-/iPhone-/iPad-Development.

Since fall 2004 I'm learning Japanese, and since fall 2005 Nisseikai Goju-Ryu Karatedo in Germering, Germany. I had to abandon the later after about one year, unfortunately. Until its closing on 31st December 2006 I was also DJ'ing at the Pulverturm, a gothic disco in Munich. Together with a friend we were doing the Dark Tuesday for five years. A colleague at Comdasys introduced me to Geocaching, where you search small plastic boxes with the aid of satellites that are worth millions of dollars (GPS), which is now one of my favorite leisure activities, together with console gaming.