In the past - a chaotic résumé
Guess my build year is about 1982, so right now I am 42 years old - or to be a little more accurate: 15404 days. And now you really think I'm changing the latter number every day? Tee-hee-hee... then what about that: I am precisely 22181806 minutes old. Just reload the page in a minute to see that it actually changes - my list of hobbies would be rather short if I really change that every minute of every day manually. :-P
So, in the end... laziness prevails! Of course those numbers are being computed. At some point in your life, a phase starts where, if someone asks you how old you are, you can't answer that right away. ;-)
Well, and I can now at least direct people to my website. It always knows how old I probably am at any given time.
So, in the end... laziness prevails! Of course those numbers are being computed. At some point in your life, a phase starts where, if someone asks you how old you are, you can't answer that right away. ;-)
Well, and I can now at least direct people to my website. It always knows how old I probably am at any given time.
A few days earlier
I was about 4 years old, when my father came back home with a strange device, called a computer. It was a Robotron KC-87.
And in an ultra-modern fashion you could save things on audio cassettes... krschBEEPrschsrhchsrhshBEEPschschsch - that's what it sounded like.
And then there was the keyboard. It was so much fun to use it until your fingers went sore, because this only took a few minutes. But in the end, I was able to play around with programming and gather some very first experiences with that when I was that young - in both Basic and Assembler, even though I was unable to differentiate between those two back then.
And in an ultra-modern fashion you could save things on audio cassettes... krschBEEPrschsrhchsrhshBEEPschschsch - that's what it sounded like.
And then there was the keyboard. It was so much fun to use it until your fingers went sore, because this only took a few minutes. But in the end, I was able to play around with programming and gather some very first experiences with that when I was that young - in both Basic and Assembler, even though I was unable to differentiate between those two back then.
Schools and sciences
When I was about 7 years old, my brother, my parents and me moved to Minden, where I attended several basic schools and a few comprehensive schools after that. The one subject I was actually good at was English - and that was simply the result of me using an Amiga my brother gave to me, so I was heavily in contact with the English language in my spare time. Regarding other school subjects, I was pretty much unmotivated regarding all of them until I was 18 years old, so until then I voluntarily left those comprehensive schools, since I didn't see my future there at all.
When I then used second-chance education to finally graduate (high-school diploma - "Realschulabschluss"), something managed to change my motivation at a fundamental level. And to my surprise, the teachers there were that factor responsible for my change - they were able to awaken some kind of fascination for each of their school subjects, like for example biology teacher Mr. Münther, who managed to massively inspire me regarding subjects like neurobiology. But probably the most extreme development came from mathematics teacher Mr. Heinisch, with who I was able to talk about maths even outside of school - how ever nerdy that might sound. That resulted in me developing growing curiosity regarding more and more sciences - maths first with several number-theory subjects, then physics with subjects like astrophysics (mostly principle of relativity) and quantum mechanics (particle physics, string theories, loop quantum theories, etc.), biology in general, medicine, archeology and several more.
When I then used second-chance education to finally graduate (high-school diploma - "Realschulabschluss"), something managed to change my motivation at a fundamental level. And to my surprise, the teachers there were that factor responsible for my change - they were able to awaken some kind of fascination for each of their school subjects, like for example biology teacher Mr. Münther, who managed to massively inspire me regarding subjects like neurobiology. But probably the most extreme development came from mathematics teacher Mr. Heinisch, with who I was able to talk about maths even outside of school - how ever nerdy that might sound. That resulted in me developing growing curiosity regarding more and more sciences - maths first with several number-theory subjects, then physics with subjects like astrophysics (mostly principle of relativity) and quantum mechanics (particle physics, string theories, loop quantum theories, etc.), biology in general, medicine, archeology and several more.
Different than expected
Now I actually wanted to start get a driving license, get a higher education entrance qualification (Abitur) and start studying physics, specializing in quantum mechanics. And right now I remember two friends from the second-chance education class, because those two once told me they could totally imagine me being a professor at a university - even though my desire actually was to join research and not do teaching. But in any case, I was too impatient and grew an ever increasing thirst of knowledge. So, studying would have taken too long and in a way I would have died of thirst. So I got self-employed, without any apprenticeship or something similar, and started a company dealing with domains, web hosting and all these things. The subjects of development and (to a certain degree) design were there as well - utilizing learning-by-doing, I taught myself how to use HTML, CSS, PHP and later SQL syntax. My very first PHP development resulted in a 160 KB large PHP file containing a complete web application for subdomain management, since my company also offered free subdomains and because there was absolutely no web software available to do subdomain management with.
During my self-employment I also kept delving into sciences to answer all the questions I kept coming up with. Had I done that at a university, this would have taken about 20-25 years. In my private studies I was able to do that in about a third of that time - especially because there were no unnecessary information (due to secondary fields of study and so on), so I was able to deal with exactly the questions I came up with, and to find answers to them.
During my self-employment I also kept delving into sciences to answer all the questions I kept coming up with. Had I done that at a university, this would have taken about 20-25 years. In my private studies I was able to do that in about a third of that time - especially because there were no unnecessary information (due to secondary fields of study and so on), so I was able to deal with exactly the questions I came up with, and to find answers to them.
Computer
At about 1990 my brother gave me the Amiga 500 mentioned above. At that time, most people considered computers something to just play with, but I mostly used it for programming. I eventually got the programming language AMOS Basic, and later AMOS Pro - a very capable programming language, though not the most efficient one when it comes to performance.
In the middle of the 90s I got an Amiga 1200, which I used - among other things - to start writing simple AIs for all kinds of purposes. At the same time I started playing around with music - using some software like ProTracker, StarTrekker and OctaMED. I used the successor of the latter one, MED SoundStudio, until 2017. That year its development was stopped sadly, so I switched over to MadTracker.
At the end of the previous millenium, PCs sadly became prevalent, so I was eventually forced to switch from Amiga to PC, even though my Amiga with 14 MHz of CPU performance was able to outperform PCs with three-digit MHz values. At about 600 MHz, PCs reached a point where they performed equally well as Amigas, so at that point I switched over.
In the middle of the 90s I got an Amiga 1200, which I used - among other things - to start writing simple AIs for all kinds of purposes. At the same time I started playing around with music - using some software like ProTracker, StarTrekker and OctaMED. I used the successor of the latter one, MED SoundStudio, until 2017. That year its development was stopped sadly, so I switched over to MadTracker.
At the end of the previous millenium, PCs sadly became prevalent, so I was eventually forced to switch from Amiga to PC, even though my Amiga with 14 MHz of CPU performance was able to outperform PCs with three-digit MHz values. At about 600 MHz, PCs reached a point where they performed equally well as Amigas, so at that point I switched over.
Professional - or yet still a hobby?
After a very very long time of self-employment - and the ever growing desire to focus on my actual abilities without having to think about stuff like marketing, advertisement and so on - I went away from self-employment and moved to having a "totally normal job" focussing on PHP development. Effectively this has been my dream job ever since: I can bring in all my abilities and knowledge so far, and ever since that started, my learning curve went crazy: in just one year, I was able to gather more new knowledge than I previously could in 5 years. Only because I could actually FOCUS on it.
And that's exactly what I wanted for many years prior to that. :-)
And that's exactly what I wanted for many years prior to that. :-)