Education
Born in march 1976 in the town of Suhl in the Thuringian forest (then belonging to the GDR, now sitting right in the center of Germany), I grew up and spent the first eight years of school there. I then changed to the Goethe school, Ilmenau where I attended one of the special courses in mathematics and the natural sciences that were incepted in the GDR and have fortunately survived until now. During that time I did a lot of mathematics and was close to participating in the International Mathematical Olympiad twice. I received my highschool diploma from the Goethe school in 1994.
After school I wanted to try something new and started studying architecture at the Bauhaus university of Weimar. After only one term I found out that my perception of the profession of an architect wasn't realistic, so I gave up that study.
I enrolled at the Friedrich Schiller university of Jena to study physics starting with the summer term 1995. As there came only few new physics students to Jena for the summer term 1995, I stuck the basic study in three instead of four terms so I could attend the lectures held for the much more numerous students who had started in the winter term. Then and also later during the advanced study, I attended mostly lectures on theoretical physics and mathematics. For the final experiment of the practical physics training I chose a topic from astronomy: the spectral classification of stars. The subject of my diploma thesis was a theoretical one as well, «Two-Dimensional Models of Black Hole Radiation». I started working on the thesis in the winter term 1998/99 at the institute of theoretical physics of the Jena university as a member of the quantum field theory group, finished it in the winter term 1999/2000, and received the diploma early 2000.
Since I intended to stay at university I then began working on a PhD thesis. I joined the gravitational theory group and chose a subject from classical general relativity: the C metric. While working on this, I had my first experiences as a seminar teacher and found that I liked this rather well. After two years, however, I switched to the Institute of computer science and started a thesis in the field of pattern recognition.
Developing software
In spring 2004 I got the opportunity to start working as a software developer at the gocept gmbh & co. kg. Work at gocept is based on the Python programming language, the Zope application server and the eco-system of software projects around Zope. Just like these systems, a good part of gocept's products are Free Software. Between 2005 and 2009 we were publishing the User's Guide to Plone, an end-user manual for the Zope-based content management system, Plone.
Besides working in a team of great colleagues and good friends, working in an open source environment is very important to me. Most of us count among the core developers of Zope and related projects.
Programming computers has been fascinating to me not only since working at gocept, however, but from the moment I first sat in front of such a device. That must have been in 1987, the machine was a K8915, a GDR-produced iron hog, and the programming language was some dialect of BASIC. Later came the C64, the BIC (a GDR computer made for education at schools) and PCs, in 1992 I started working rather intensely with the LaTeX typesetting system and programming languages such as Turbo Pascal, later C, Perl, PHP and finally – starting work at gocept – Python. I've been using Linux as an operating system since 1999 when I got used to Unix-like systems in daily use at university.
As of today, I've been publishing a number of small software projects of my own, which are technically related to those I deal with at gocept, but mostly serve to ease some aspect of my everyday life, such as creating this web site. I've started maintaining the LaTeX project web site in 2003 and am a member of the LaTeX developers team.
Other interests
Two of my leisure-time pursuits are reflected on this web site at length: programming and photography. My main photographic interests lie with subjects such as nature, scenery and architecture, but also musical concerts.
However, I don't write online about many things that are of interest to me. One thing taking time for which I'm currently re-learning is reading books. I'm trying, on the one hand, to catch up on the «most important» pieces of world literature while, on the other hand, keeping up with my growing collection of books. Beside the german Insel-Bücherei, I'm mostly after old books and editions of high typographic quality. Speaking of which, my long-time contact with LaTeX and the projects and people close to it have made me develop quite some enthusiasm for typography as a craft and art.
Other than the above, I spend my spare time with friends and family and things such as hiking, playing the game of Go, going to concerts (where my taste in music is mostly for the Metal genre but also allows for some classical music now and then), riding my motorcycle, learning Swedish and occasionally spending an evening in the fantasy world of the german role-playing game, «The dark eye».
