About me

I was born and raised in Germany and lived there for quite some time before I moved to the United States. Kentucky to be exact. Which actually has nothing to do with horses but rather the fact that my current job is in Kentucky and thus living here actually makes the commute much easier.

At heart, I am a software developer. For the most part of my professional life so far, I have been developing software solutions to help customers to efficiently manage and improve their individual domain. For a while, I moved into the project management area in order to get a better understanding of the management aspect and, more importantly, analyzing the disconnect between management and engineering that causes projects to either fail completely or return diminished results.

The years in project management provided me with the understanding of the difficulties in successfully delivering software solutions under the pressure of changing requirements, deadlines and limited budgets. Knowledge, that I currently apply to turn customer requirements into working solutions more efficiently.

In my (limited) spare time, I try to keep at least a generic understanding of the latest methodologies, languages, frameworks etc. but the industry is certainly moving at a pretty fast pace these days.

About computers

I got my first computer in the eighties: A Commodore VIC-20 or, to be exact, a Commodore VC20 as it was called in Germany. I essentially used this computer to drive my parents nuts by always blocking the family TV. I peeked and poked my way around this computer before I actually decided that it was time to upgrade.

My next computer was surprisingly not the famous Commodore 64 as one may have expected but rather a Commodore 128D which was a fancy Commodore 128 for the European market only. To my parents relief, it actually allowed to use a monitor so that they could actually watch TV again. I mainly used this computer to play the latest games (usually when I rather should have studied) but also started to program in Basic.

It actually got interesting with the release of the Amiga. A friend of mine actually owned an Amiga 1000 and I remember staring at the awesome graphics and listening to the sounds generated by that machine. Unfortunately, they were a little bit out of the price range for the regular teenager thus, I actually waited for the more affordable Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 to come out before switching over. Using the Amiga, a couple of friends and myself developed a strategy game (using Basic) which we then marketed on our own. Things were far simpler back then...

After that, the PC actually took over...my first PC was a mere 386 with almost no RAM. It took me a while to raise the money for a sparkling hyper-fast 486DX-100 but it felt blazingly fast compared to the old one. At that time, I actually started to look into alternatives to Basic and pretty much ended up with C and later with C++.

From that point on, it essentially moved straight-forward. A couple of more PCs and lately Macs have been accompanied me over the last couple of years. While I certainly broadened and still continue to broad my horizon with different languages, I am somehow deeply attached to C++ due to its power and flexibility.

About the website

Even though I am a developer, I am no web designer. In order to create this website, I used many tips, tricks, code samples as well as resources from various sites on the Internet.

• The overall design is based on the 'Colourise' CSS template found at Styleshout.com. I kept the fixed width, 2 columns with a right sidebar and the top navigation. I did, however, modify the color scheme in some areas as well as using a more black-on-white scheme for the content area.
• The rounded corners used to soften the content boxes, displayed throughout the website, were generated with the basic generator provided by RoundedCornr.