Today’s blogpost is all about me. I joined gocept about a year ago, therefore I want to tell you something about the past – and something about the future.
The Past
Before joining the gocept crew, I studied computing at the HTWK in Leipzig for 6 years. Since sitting in a german university was not enough for me, I reached out to study in the UK for the best time of a year. This way I came to the University of Bolton near Manchester, where – most importantly – I learned to speak English fluently.
During my time in the UK I started to look into Ruby on Rails and earned my first salaries. This was the point were I switched my Linux PC for a Mac. Since I already was comfortable with Windows and Linux I wanted to try out the last big operation system out there. But as many before me, I liked the Mac so much that I still use it as my development machine.
Back in Germany I continued to earn some money on the side working with Ruby on Rails. I really enjoyed using Ruby and I think in terms of readability it’s ahead of most other programming languages by several magnitudes. But Ruby also has its shortcomings, which I did not recognize until I switched to Python as my main programming language here at gocept.
I also did some very interesting projects during my studies, here are just three of them:
- An OCR software which recognizes mathematical symbols. The idea was to integrate it into the Leibniz-project to make it possible for blind people to read mathematical school books.
- An iPhone app that helps developers and freelancers to get better at estimating how long it takes to implement a feature or project.
- A scientific article about software estimation that was actually published in print!
After I finished my master thesis, I had the opportunity to go on a 2-month vacation with my wife. So we took two backpacks and travelled around the entire US. A memory I will feast on my entire life. You can get some impressions on my flickr fotostream.
The Future
During the last year at gocept, I dove into the code base of two of our biggest clients – DGB and Ver.di – and helped improving their CMS. Currently I am getting in touch with the code base of Zeit Online, since a colleague will move to the upper floor, where our admins are situated.
But most importantly, you will see me more often around here, since I will be writing about things we do and learn here at gocept during the following months. I already have some topics on my desk which are worth a blogpost. For example, why hg rebase can be harmful, why testing AJAX using Jasmine is a pain, the benefits of a headless browser like PhantomJS and many more.
Next up will be a post about something we did at the summer sprint, which includes an Arduino, an LED strip and a failing test server.