About me
Several details about me, my work and other projects
I've been born in 1975 in a city called Leer ('Leer' meaning 'Empty'; Yes that's the real name of that city). After my diploma from German secondary school qualifying for university admission or matriculation in 1996 I continued with the alternative civilian service at a hospital. In 1997 I began the apprenticeship as IT specialist with the main focus on software development. We have dual way training here in Germany (company + school). The apprenticeship takes three years and you spend 2 days a week at a business school and 3 days (sometimes 4 days) at the company for one year. The other two year's you have only 1 day a week at school and the other 4 days (sometimes 5 days) at the company.
The group of different IT specialist education changed in 1997 here in Germany. They split it up to specialize and focus on the main field of activity. We had now the main focus software development, sales, technical and other fields. Before this change there was only one training at school (Datenverarbeitungskaufmann) and people had to do e.g. programming even if they didn't need that qualificaton for their job. The apprenticeship took 3 years (from 1997 to 2000) with the final examination test and a project that had to be presented to a group of people from different companies that are representatives of the chamber of commerce and industry.
During this time I got in contact with different relational database systems (Visual FoxPro, MS SQL-Server, MySQL and other) which didn't let me go since then (see Projects).
Acting on your own initiative was important for the company I was working for.
This isn't normal for most other companies.
Part of my daily work was the import from data gathered from different
ERP systems, statistic reports for our customers, controlling different
devices like Barcode-Scanner, Label-/POS-Printer, electronic scales
and so on.
You don't have to forget that most of the devices were not controlled
by a Windows driver but had to be programmed directly (by hand)
e.g. using the printer language!
Beside the above described business activities the electronic data interchange (EDI) was part of my job description. EDI is used to exchange business messages like invoices, orders and other using EDIFACT between companies.
During my work I got in contact with some of the major companies in Germany like e.g. REWE (food store chain), Bayer AG (pharmaceutical and medical products), OBI and Hagebau (both DIY store chains).
Another format used to transfer price and product information is for example DATANORM (used by MAXDATA) is normally used by tradesman (HVAC).
I worked at the same company for over a year after completing the apprenticeship time and then decided to study computer science at the University of Oldenburg which started in October 2001. While studying I worked occasionally for my old employer and other companies. I was also working at the business management of the University of Oldenburg where I was extending the groupware system Open-Xchange and also working as admin. The groupware system has been selected in the winter semester 2004/2005 as project in the seminar "P30 - Open Source interdisciplinary". It has been introduced in the summer semester 2005 for the executive committee of the university. Because the other administration groups also needed a groupware system, those also got access to Open-Xchange.
After submitting my thesis (Title: "A repository to support the selection of architectural styles within the scope of the MidArch method") end of June 2008 and the following presentation in July 2008 I completed my final year project very successful and ended my studies.
Part of my hobbies are regulary going to the movies (closely related to the Java Movie Database project), inline-skating, RC modelling, reading, programming (Java, C#, Pascal/Delphi, TotalCross/SuperWaba, sometimes a little C, REXX, Visual FoxPro, SQL,...) and some other things.
