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 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. But 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. Today (December 2007) we employ over a dozen full-time employees and also some freelancers.

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.

In January 2007 I got my first Mac, a MacBook Pro. Until then I was a Linux-only guy (my home is MicroSoft-free since 1999, except for my MS-DOS 6.22 retro-gaming box) and still am a Linux enthusiast. Linux has come a long way, especially the KDE desktop environment is great. But the Mac is a Unix-system with great usability and is very interesting simply because Apple does things differently than everybody else... and they do it with style :-) And since Leopard they also have virtual desktops which is one the most important desktop features to me.