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.

Even though I currently work more in the project management area, I guess one can say that I was actually born as a software developer. It took me some time before I realized it, which actually helped the computer industry to come up with affordable mainstream computers though.

While my job currently does not leave much time to develop software, I still try to keep involved with our development division and contribute to our software. Nonetheless, the majority of software development is actually done in my spare time. I like to keep up with 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.
  • The small graphics used for the news details are taken from the 'SimpleBlog' CSS template found at Styleshout.com.
  • Some parts of the website use JavaScript to enhance the functionality or experience. Some of these scripts need to be executed once the page has finished loading. In order to execute more than one script, I use a technique from Simon Willison posted to his blog in 2004.
  • The website contains a couple a tables providing e.g. search results that will continue to grow the more content is added. For better readability, the tables are designed as so-called zebra tables which simply means that the rows in the table have alternating colors. Ask the CSS Guy wrote a nice article back in 2006 named "Row Locking with CSS and JavaScript" which adds highlighting and row locking to a zebra table. I used his scripts as the base, modified them slightly to fit my needs and also used his color scheme for striping and highlighting.