What is this place?
It is my personal corner on the web. Here I write about things that interest me, talk about my experiences and observations and share my thoughts and ideas. Most of what I say is related to software development in one way or another or at least has something to do with software or programming.
This works as a continuous series of publications which I classify into three categories: resources, articles and blog entries. Whenever I come across an interesting place, I bookmark it for myself and share it in resources. When I write something focused to serve as a tutorial or a problem solving guide, I put it into articles. Everything else goes to my blog. Comments are possible and welcome on all types of publications.
Who are you?
I’m a software developer based in Stuttgart, Germany. I create software professionally and for fun. I started programming some time back in 1994 when I learned Pascal and Borland IDE. Around 1998 I came into C/C++ development and had a great time with it developing for Windows up until 2005. In 2003 I started with .NET/C# which quickly became my favorite development framework. In 2005 I tried web development for the first time and desperately fell in love with it. I have been developing with ASP.NET ever since and haven’t looked back. Recently my focus of attention turned towards ASP.NET MVC which I consider a major step forward for the ASP.NET development world.
At present I work full-time as a web application developer for a local software company in Stuttgart, Germany. I help building a line-of-business application operating as software-on-demand (software-as-a-service). In my free time I also work on some personal projects, read and now write as well.
My professional interests are now all around the web. Well, that’s not entirely true. Starting with the web has been an opening experience for me for I ventured into an environment that asks for more than just a technical aptitude. Ever since I left the system programming island and started my journey into the web seas, I started to think more of less-programming challenges such as usability, user interface design and various aspects of human-computer-interaction and user psychology. I consider the web to be an amazing development environment. It is also an ultimate delivery platform that reaches out to all possible customers. It gives a chance to an individual developer to get the word out there, but at the same time challenges him to make his best and better or step aside. But that’s a story for another time.
So my interests include all areas of web development, including usability, user-centered design, web design, UI design, rich interfaces, SEO (search engine optimization) and online marketing. I’m still very much into programming, so I’m interested in application architecture, framework design, naturally in ASP.NET MVC and in scalable high-performance systems. I also like the ideas behind all types of social software (I did my thesis at SAP on the design of an enterprise social network platform) and the concepts of software-on-demand and software-as-a-service. For some time graphical design has become my passion for I love style, beauty and harmony in everything.
Why do you write?
Because I love writing. Because I regularly discover I have some interesting experiences and observations to share. Because I believe publishing them would benefit a great number of people. And because it has become so simple to publish now when I do not need to look for a place or a community with an appropriate format to accept my writings. I also wish my contributions to be freely accessible for readers on the web without a need for them to register with one service or another.
I also write to build up my own knowledge base for future reference. In my practice I constantly discover new possibilities or better ways of doing things, find solutions to various problems or research something that yields an interesting opportunity yet unneeded right at this moment. To get back to it later I would normally need to search for it again, look up in old projects, check out old bookmarks or try it anew effectively going through the same steps again which is rather ineffective and contradicts the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle. So it seems to be a good way to save the knowledge for the future. And if it helps somebody else, that would only be great.
What is your site powered by?
By magic, naturally. Seriously, if you ask which CMS (Content Management System) or blog engine I use, then the answer is none. I have manually created this site from scratch, mostly for fun and to see what it leads to. It is built with ASP.NET MVC framework, runs on SQL Server 2008 and the internals are based on the proper n-tier architecture with ADO.NET and stored procedures. So far this has worked great.
I like your writings. May I republish them on my site or elsewhere?
I’m sorry, but the answer is no. As much as I wish to freely share my knowledge, I would also like to build up my own place and exercise control over what I write and in what context and environment it is offered. You may however link to my publications from your resource. If you wish to translate some of my writings into another language, please get in touch with me on that matter.
I need to tell you something. How?
You can drop me a line using the form below. I will respond at my first opportunity. I also welcome feedback and suggestions for all my publications as well as regarding this site itself.
Also follow me on StackOverflow where I regularly appear (see my flair below).