Programming is my favourite hobby for now more than 30 years. At the age of 16 I sat in the auditorium as one of the winners of the “Golden Disk”, a programming competition of the BMFT, and heard Heinz Nixdorf say in his laudatory speech: “I know how you feel now. I know about the enthusiasm to create new technology, but don’t get stuck in that, I tell you, life is even more colourful!”
In the years that followed, I programmed a video game that was sold internationally, developed system software for highend graphics cards and online banking applications. As a real computer nerd I actually hadn’t really heared the words of Heinz Nixdorf until 15 years later, when an illness forced me to modify my professional life and let completely new topics enter my life. For one I decided from now on to only do what I really wanted to do.
Following this turning point I did knowledge management consulting, with the human being in the center - knowledge always resides between two ears. Later I cofounded a publishing house around the thoughts that had helped me through my illness and beyond. After this I became a teacher because I wanted to introduce programming and the wonderful culture of collaboration in this field to the current generation of students.
In these three steps, I wrote three books: one about Knowledge Communities, one about some outrageously provocative secrets in Goethe’s Faust and a novel in which teenagers recapture the Internet from global corporations and intelligence agencies.
And then, almost 19 years after my career change, I went back to where I started: to software development, home I would say. Meanwhile there were Nodejs, React and Redux, Jest and Enzyme and Stackoverflow, git, AWS and Heroku and Bitbucket Pipelines. Crazy new things. It took me a year to get in there and another year to get really running and being able to “play” again. Here I am today.