About me

My programming “career” starts nearly 30 years ago. I was fascinated by video games at the beginning of the 80s. Those were my first steps into programming. From there I started programming at the local mall and soon got my own computer. After programming in Basic on a C64 and Amstrad CPC I moved to assembler programming (6502 and Z80). In the late 80s I bought one of the first Amiga 500s in Germany (later an Amiga4000/040/Retina), kept going with assembler development (68k) and got involved in the demo scene. Along the way I’ve learned E, Pascal, C and several other languages on my Amiga and DOS at school.

University and the internet

At the start of the 90s I went to university and came in contact with the first examples of the internet in Germany, years before the world wide web and even before DNS - people did possess lists of IP addresses of FTP and IRC servers and swapping those addresses was common. We wrote IRC clients in C and first web applications. During my university years I learned and used lots of languages like Modula-2, Oberon, Lisp, Prolog, Perl, TCL/Tk or C++ and used DEC Alphas, SUNs and NeXT cubes. My major subjects were distributed systems and databases, sprinkled in some medicine as a minor subject and philosophy as a second field of study beside computer science.

My first job

When the internet became commercial in the mid 90s I applied for a development job at a biotech startup, which brought a laboratory into the internet. Because of the company growth I was soon head of development. With several such posts in some startups more I’ve came into contact with Perl, Delphi and mostly Python.

My startup

After finishing university - which took some time because of my manager jobs - I went to Berlin to found a startup with some friends. We got founded - with me as a CTO - by a VC and specialized in a knowledge managment software solution in Java, EJBs, XML and XSLT. Later with the bursting of the dot com bubble we had to close shop as investments dried up, but I’ve learned a lot.

The present

After some years of research and consulting into software development at Fraunhofer I’m currently a team manager at ImmobilienScout24 in Germany, a rather big real estate listing website.

In my spare time I’ve developed open source projects, wrote frameworks and dabbled in interesting topics like Rails, game development and AI. I like to give speeches at conferences and help people optimize their software development.

What does Code Monkeyism mean?

You’re blog is called “Code Monkeyism”, what does that mean? The term is taken from the song “Code Monkey” by Jonathan Coulton and is often used as a self-describing, ironic term for software developer. So Code Monkeyism is about everything relevant to code monkeys and people who deal with them.

Yours
Stephan
stephan@reposita.org