..and a longing to explore the great unknown.

The 90's

..creating software was so easy.

After a brief career start as an industry mechanic, I discovered that creating software was what I really wanted to do. I enrolled at the Technical University Hamburg-Harburg to study Technical Informatics.

I enjoyed the high standard of education of the TU and but soon decided that the emphasis on electrotechnics was not what I wanted and moved on to the Fachhochschule Hamburg to enroll in Software-Techniques which used a more hands-on approach and allowed me to learn exactly what I needed for the jobs that I was meanwhile working in.

During this time I got involved in my first role as software architect and developer in what was initially a one man project. Creating a telephony voice response system written in C/C++. I had no more than 3 months to get it running from scratch as it was already booked for a big marketing campaign. I managed to accomplish that and with this background received the opportunity to present my concepts for a telephony response system to Richard Seibt, then head of software of IBM Germany. This presentation promoted me and the team that had evolved out of the project, to an office at IBM Hamburg with a development contract and the goal to create a telephony solution for IBM.

The Company - GIquadrat mbH.

..meaning business.

With the first customer projects approaching the team decided, that we needed a company to buffer the financial risks involved. This led to the founding of GIquadrat mbH in 1997. I was co-founder and acted as CEO until I left the company to go sailing. 15 years of developing a company had rushed past, the mayor projects being CallSystem for IBM built in C/C++ on OS/2 and our own product CCTS. Please see the  [Projects page east] for more detail.

The Journey

..letting it all go.

The plan to sail around the world had been there for a long time, together with a desire to do something more exiting. I needed a new challenge that was not just a new project deadline. So in 2011 I bought my boat.

After a training season in the Mediterranean, I sailed my Yacht [Qi east] west in November 2012 - to Gibraltar, from there to the Canary Islands and across the Atlantic to Martinique where I arrived on New Year's Day 2013. It took another year of abstinence from programming - being too busy exploring the Caribbean Islands - before I started to engage in software development again.

Drawn back to the keyboard

..just couldn't leave it alone

While I was held up by repairs on the Pacific side of Panama, it crossed my mind that there must be the most amazing amount of traffic on my boat's  [AIS east] as repeaters where allowing me to monitor traffic from the Atlantic to the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. I started developing a system using a Raspberry Pi to retrieve that and other boat sensor related information and visualize it on mobile devices.

With this and other private projects I managed to keep up to date with the ever changing trends in the software business. When you are part of it you might not notice - but from an outside perspective it was amazing to watch how virtually everything about the way we make software changed within just 5 years. I took until 2018 - when my boat needed some mayor work done - that I went back to developing to earn money.

By then I had crossed the Pacific, seen Galapagos, the Marquesas, the Tuamotus and Tahiti, got married in Moorea, sailed to Brisbane/Australia via Fiji and New Caledonia and then after a year in Ozz, headed back south-east across the Tasman Sea to live in the beautiful Islands of Aotearoa/New Zealand for a while.

By the way - New zealand is a sailors dream: Stunningly beautiful, inhabited by friendliest people and when it starts getting a little miserable and cold in autumn, you sail the South Pacific Loop:

(NZ east [Tonga | Samoa | Fiji | New Caledonia for winter]east NZ for summer)

New Horizons

..just like in the 90's

Today I feel that the Software industry has come around to where it was a long time ago. AI aided development tools are on the brink of taking over our work, but while they are not quite there yet, they allow us to multiply our capacity and our skills.

Where it used to be that every product idea needed 20 person team, and several million dollars in startup capital, we are now able attend to several different, overseeing roles while a lot of the grunt-work is automated - done by AI assistants.

I have seen complex pieces of software emerge in bare minutes, leaving me with design, project management, testing and quality assurance jobs rather than actual coding. Some things that were never my forte - like aesthetic UI design jobs - are solved out of the box so finally I am rid on my clumsy (and color blind) UIs.

Now I am using my time to embrace these new powers and creating things I could never have dreamed of - even in the 90's .