In a seven week internship at Schüco KG, fellow student Ulf Hockertz and myself developed a filter module that takes machine control files, and modifies them according to user-defined filter files. This included a GUI for interactive editing of filter files. (C++, Visual Studio)

My first assignment with the Jostmeiersoft GmbH were two modules for the standard application "Market Conformity Checking" (MCC), calculating liquidities and volatilities of market data. Christian Blaser supported me in the unfamiliar VB environment. (VisualBasic / Access, SQL)

This function library abstracted access to market data (hence the name). It provided several aggregation functions, and later replaced the aforementioned VBA modules with built-in functionality. Co-developed by Stefan Sayk and myself. (VisualBasic, SQL)

This utility enabled conversion of data records (on investment trades) to the import format of the MCC application - time-triggered and including a GUI for specifying new source formats. (VisualBasic / Access)

During the reimplementation of MCC as Java application I worked on several "old acquaintances", especially the reimplementation of the Market.dll as Java module. (Java / JBuilder)

After signing up with Commerzbank and getting to know the new application (Market Data Distribution Service), my first larger assignment was to connect the IZV department to our system. (C++ / VisualStudio)

Probably my most successful project so far. When I left Commerzbank five years later, CoFI was the primary (and easiest) interface to MDDS for developers, business unit, and customers with small to medium data volume alike. Request files in XML format are transformed into server requests, and the reply data turned into either (at user's option) XML or CSV output files, with seperators, delimiters, numerical and calendar data format being fully configurable by the user. Additional output formats could easily be retrofitted by plug-in classes. (Prior to CoFI, access to MDDS had to be done via COM interface or a C++ library, i.e. required development on the customer side.) (C++)

(C++, Perl, SQL)

Maintenance and improvement of crucial function libraries, applications and process chains in the field of address validation. (C++, Java, Bash, Perl)

To make building the various components and their dependencies on the individual supported platforms (AIX, Linux, Windows) easier and reproducable, I created a unified and maintenance-friendly build framework based on the idea of Gentoo Portage. (bash, cmd, make, autoconf, automake, MSVC, AIX, Linux, ...)

Implementing a Java wrapper for EOMS monitoring. (C++, JNI, Java)

Administration and support for the team's development- and testserver. (Linux, XEN)

Participated in miscellaneous projects in the Oracle environment. (PL/SQL, Oracle Application Express)

Ad-hoc solutions for short-term, customer-specific data processing. (Perl)

My first "meaningful" program: a database to store, evaluate, and print attendance lists. (At a time when "database" was not a term I knew.) Was used for about a year in my local Judo club. (Basic 7.0 / C128)

The tabletop game "Blood Bowl" by Games Workshop combines elements of Warhammer tabletop and American Football. The rules include guidelines for setting up a league; after a "test season" with 4 teams the second season saw 16 participants. For managing the team rosters, game results etc., I wrote the program "Ligameister" (league master), which also printed the team rosters for the next game. The program was used for over a year. (Basic 7.0 / C128)

For the website amigaworld.com, in 1994 I became maintainer of the "Amiga Version Watch" - an overview of the sources and latest versions of software for the Amiga PC. This script lessened the workload significantly: It searched the Aminet index semi-automatically for version updates, allowed updating of existing and creation of new records, and automatically generated the HTML files for the Version Watch from its internal database. At the time Version Watch was discontinued due to the worsening software situation of the Amiga platform, the service updated over 1500 software titles every week, and had several thousand visitors every month. (ARexx / Amiga)

Shortly after the Version Watch, I also became maintainer of the "Amiga News & Stories" at amigaworld.com - a page with the latest news about the Amiga, in both German and English. Here, too, I wrote a script in ARexx (an Amiga dialect of REXX) to make the maintenance easier. Every news item (including header and hyperlink to the source) was written to a plaintext file. The script took the most recently updated textfiles and turned them into the HTML for the news site. Later, the "Amiga News & Stories" joined the Amiga-News.de of Petra Struck: Petra did the research, I generated an English mirror for her previously German-only page; first alone, then with a team of voluntary translators. The script remained in service, with only minor modifications, even after I left the team in early 2000 to focus on my career and Martina Jacobs took over as maintainer of the English pages. Only some time later Amiga-News.de switched to a proprietary MySQL/PHP solution. (ARexx / Amiga)

Late 2001 I came up with the plan to develop a new operating system. Lots of work were done on design, infrastructure and communication; sadly this project was - measured by its "success" - a complete desaster, since many people were interested in design and concept, but not in actually doing the development. Nevertheless the work was educating, both technically and socially. (C++ / Assembler)

'Astyle' is a source reformatter for the C, C++, Java, and C# programming languages, developed by Tal Davidson. This tool is employed in several other tools, including KDevelop and jEdit. The author did not invest in bug fixes and continued development for some time, and I volunteered to work on refactoring and development of the sources. Regrettably, my demands on a next release and myself proved to be too high, so I eventually passed the project on to Jim Pattee. (C++)

For Pro-POS a standard C library had to be found; for licensing reasons, neither glibc nor newlib were valid options, and we decided to write our own C library and to give it to the development community as Public Domain. After the discontinuation of Pro-POS, this project was continued as "spin-off" by myself, whenever I found the time for it. (C99)

To provide my local soccer club with a zero-budget live ticker, I created a script that read tweets from a dedicated Twitter account, did some pattern matching (to determine start and end of the game, the current score, where to put little icons for yellow cards, send-offs and goals etc.), and reformatted the tweets to a more "soccer-appropriate" representation. I hosted the script here on rootdirectory.de, and fed the ticker myself via SMS for the better part of the year; the service was linked from the official club site. Eventually, the service was cancelled because I wanted to see more of the game and less of my mobile, and no replacement "twitterer" could be found. (PHP)

Early 2011 I began to translate the 2nd Edition "Rolemaster", a classic fantasy-roleplaying game from Iron Crown Enterprises, into German, including some heavy re-editing, for private use. In this project, I desired to keep the layout as close to the original rulebooks as possible. (LaTeX)

• Roleplaying Games (especially I.C.E.'s Rolemaster)
• Soccer, more precisely the SC Verl playing in the Regionalliga West