Practice

My first PC was an Intel 286. I mostly used WordPerfect 5.2, Lotus 1-2-3 and Harvard Graphics. Internet access was via dial-up connection using a modem. It was both slow and expensive. Getting annoyed with Microsoft products, I switched to Linux (RedHat 5.1) and since then use Windows only for testing.

I began to program HTTP requests to download Internet pages for offline reading. I learned about SGML, DTSs and parsers, and wrote DSSSL to transform documents into different formats. I wrote my first scripts in bash and Perl and also discoverd the Berkeley DB.

I began to work professionally as web application develper in 1999, when I became a job at Ocean-7 Development in New York City. It was a pleasant team and we worked on numerous diverse projects. XML and XSLT were hot. Web application related frameworks and libraries rapidly developed and every project was a new learning experience. Learning by doing was our motto.

Additionally to HTML, CSS and JavaScript, which were part of most projects, I was mostly programming Perl and also Java. On top of that, I was responsible for the administration of the company's Linux servers.

Since returning to Germany I work as a freelancer. I like to program Ruby and Java, but often write PHP, simply because it is used for so many applications. JavaScript has long been prominent to enhance otherwise static websites, but more recently, with the dissemination of client-side web applications and NodeJS, I find myself programming a lot of JavaScript.

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