Who is behind it

It all started with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I was ten years old when I first sat in front of a computer, and it did not stay with games for long. Soon I was writing my first programs in BASIC, line by line, with the patience a machine demands when it reports every mistake without mercy. Then came the C64 and the Amiga. In 1994 I got my first PC, and the Windows 3.11 it came with quickly made way for Linux. My early access to the internet helped with that. Anyone installing Linux back then had to understand how a system works from the inside, and that understanding is still with me today.

I owed that access to my physics studies. Back then the internet was a network hardly anyone outside the universities knew, and not everything in it was colourful. Alongside the first web pages in the Mosaic browser there was a whole world made of nothing but text: Telnet sessions, FTP servers, Gopher and Usenet newsgroups. On Sun SPARCstations I built my first homepages, at a time when every page was still written by hand. In a student project I worked with neural networks for the first time, with what was possible in the mid-nineties. It sounds modest today; back then it was a glimpse of the future.

At the same time I worked at the user help desk of the University of Cologne’s computing centre. It was a thorough training on the job: students, staff and professors came with everything IT had to offer at the time, from PC problems and internet access to email programs and access to the central mainframes. Almost everything was done by hand. That is where I learned to listen, to explain technology clearly and to find a solution that fits exactly the person in front of me.

After switching from physics to computer science, I graduated with a German diploma in computer science (Diplom-Informatiker). From 2003 to 2009 I worked in research and academia. At TH Köln (University of Applied Sciences) I looked after the introduction of digital learning and learning management, among other things, and was responsible for IT in an ERASMUS project. At ZB MED, the German National Library of Medicine, I worked on ordering systems and search engines, making sure people quickly find what they need in large collections of data.

Then I moved into industry. Since then I have gained more than 15 years of experience as a Senior Software Engineer, at a large mid-sized mechanical engineering company and at an internationally operating financial services provider. My work sat where systems meet. I analysed processes, built data flows with ETL processes, defined interfaces and gave technical advice to internal customers, from the German holding company to the international subsidiaries. Today, AI is part of my daily toolkit.

3D printing came to me through my hobbies. Building model aircraft, working on my motorcycle and tinkering kept raising problems you simply could not buy a solution for. So I designed and printed the solutions myself. Today AI helps me with that: instead of building every part by hand in a CAD system, I let AI support me with the design. It is faster, and it often produces ideas I would not have come up with on my own.

And then there is gliding. Flying without an engine teaches perseverance, forward planning and good decisions when conditions change. You read the weather and the terrain, weigh things up and take responsibility for every decision. That is exactly the attitude I bring to my projects.