INTRODUCTION
I am a Web Geek
And I love it. Since 2001 I am working, living for for and with web thingys. I am creating products and startups with like-minded people and companies. I am the (Co-)founder of dovigo, tbd and the guy who developed des.
When people ask me what I am doing for a living, most of the time I am not sure what I should answer. If you say something extravagant, people may think you are arrogant, if you say you are doing things with the PC, it's just not right. So I guess, I am a:
“Web Geek, Design and Technology Enthusiast with a strong focus on founding startups.”
You can contact me on Twitter, XING ,LinkedIn or G+.
My photos can be found on flickr and picasa.
There are also some videos I have uploaded on vimeo,
but don't expect too much.
I also host a Wiki with work-related documents at my own server.
There is usually nothing interesting for you, but if you are still interested, you
are free to take a look at it Dovigo Wiki.
I am currently hired by an Austrian business development company in Salzburg. I am the lead developer, responsible for development and technical strategy over there. If you are seeking for a job or you are willing to change, don't hesitate to contact us. Have a look at all the open positions here RC-Eins GmbH - Jobs. There is always a place for talented people in our office.
I am always searching for like-minded people and want to meet them, either in virtual or in reality.
If you are interested into developing, thinking about the 3rd generation of web applications
and you are not afraid of daily business work, you are welcome. Currently i am searching for
a partner who has a strong background in Java, Distributed Computing and some experience in writing web based service API's for dovigo.
Some things i am working on, can be found at the labs
section of this site, but most of my stuff is hosted at my private
Subversion repository which is located here https://dovigo.com/svn/ (protected).
From time to time i am writing about technical stuff on my Blog,
which can be found here impossiblearts.com/blog.
BIOGRAPHY
“Lead Developer, Freshminds-BD GmbH & Co. KG ”
How everything started
I started to work as an Interactive Developer around the time when the first dotcom bubble exploded. I had a personal interest in developing Flash™ based applications, websites and games and I was inspired by a lot of companies from this time. Some of them are dead now and some of them haven't evolved over the last years but everyone of these had a great influence on my work, so they are worth to be mentioned.
I did work as a freelancer for a bunch of companies around my hometown Salzburg in Austria. I really enjoyed this time but I always felt a bit lost in this world of communication design & marketing. So I decided to attend to the University of Applied Siences in Salzburg to meet like-minded people, to work on nice projects and to get a proper education.
In the summer between 4th and 5th semester i went to Berlin for 3 weeks. With 20 other people, I was working for a NGO formerly known as Dropping Knowledge (now they are the Mindpirates. This was one of the best experiences I ever made and someday I would love to go back to Berlin to live and work there.
I always felt as an autodidact and so I attended the
courses for 3D-Animation and Communication Design even if I always had the feeling of being more of a software developer kind of person.
I still did a lot of game programing during this time, especially within Flash™, ActionScript 2 & 3 and some business
with small to midsized companies which wanted to have websites based on CM systems(CMS). I have created dozens of websites
with Typo3 and Wordpress and late 2007 i also started to work as a trainer at the WDA Salzburg.
This was a very nice experience and I did this job for 2 subsequent years. I also teached adults some basic webdesign knowledge at the WIFI and
I also was a Tutor at my university (for 5 years).
My personal interest in games led me to the topic off my diploma thesis. Interactive Realtime Fluids which i finished in 2010.
I also always had a strong relation to design and interactivity which is related to my personal masterplan of getting a polymath.
I love great UI and usability concepts and I am a long-time follower of theFWA, the HTML5 committee and
a lover of great open-source projects, such as jQuery, Sass and blueprintcss. From the early beginning
of my working career I have been a fan of Macromedia™ products, even when they get acquired by Adobe (Fireworks is the tool of my choice
for prototyping) and the Flash™ runtime is at a dead-end now.
A new episode
began when I started to work for the company RC-Eins GmbH in Germany.
Initially hired as an Interactive Developer I had to learn quickly, that this was a completely new challenge. I had some
deep knowledge about PHP and MySQL before but I had to design and deploy a complete infrastructure and I also had to take decisions and create plans for
a complete ecosystem for serveral years. At this time I started to develop a lot of backend stuff,
especially for high scalable and distributed systems.
For a soft migration from spaghetti code to a more object-oriented system I added ZendFramework as a requirement to the existing LAMP stack,
introduced a version control system(Subversion) to all projects, established a fixed build and deployment pipeline with Hudson and ANT and I also did a lot of
optimizing regarding performance (caching with APC and Memcached. The former completely static frontend, has been replaced by a dynamic, much more flexible system and the first
time ever, the development process has seen some Q&A here. All this enhancements and 2 years later we were able to create a new product and
we did it successfully.
Here and now
I am the "Lead Developer" and second man of the company. We are ready for new challenges, trying to increase our team, adding new projects to our portfolio and in general, having a good time. I am constantly working on new projects for and outside of my company and I really love conversations with like-minded people, either if they have a business, design or engineering background.
I really love to evaluate new possibilities, talk to creative people with a hands-on mentality which are not afraid of creating businesses and know how to found and fund them. Sometimes people may call me a work-o-holic but I always decline because I think you can never do too much of a thing you really enjoy.
The last months were pretty good and with the end of 2011 I expect that all the open tasks left for the restructuring of our company
will be closed. We are looking forward to a new age of enterprise applications based on a more robust ecosystem (e.g. Java, Scala & Grails).
We will try to escape our limitations and be more progressive with the use of advanced technology and concepts such as Storm, Hadoop and Cloud Computing.
In my free time
In 2008 I started to travel a bit more than usual and I get the feeling that this is something I should do more often. Since then I have visited Vienna, Barcelona and New York City and in February 2012 I will goto Stockholm for some days. I really love the athmosphere of an appealing urban culture and how people live within their cities. The best thing about this new hobby, there a lot of cities left that I can travel to, so it will take a lot more years to get bored of this.
I am also what some people may call a TV sitcom junky. I am particularly addicted to How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family and The Big Bang Theory but there are at least 10 more sitcoms and serials i am constantly watching.