I was born in the mid 70′s in Berlin, Germany. Already at the beginning of middle school I grew very much interested in computers and programing, writing little games in BASIC on the VIC20 (an, even then, very old computer - I had fun anyway). The internship we had to do in 9th grade, I did in a physical research facility called Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, where I wrote an ATARI pascal program for measuring the quality of a laser over a long active period. That was my first reallyuseful program, and I’m still very proud of it .

After school I investigated several possibilities and decided to study mathematics, a very good choice by the way. I concentrated on differential geometry and mathematical visualization, and was part of a team that created a program for mathematical visualization called JavaView, while I was a student. Finally I received my diploma (Dipl. math. techn.). My diploma thesis was about analyzing vector fields with a discrete version of Hodge-Helmholtz-Decomposition.

I stayed at university as a research assistant for two years, first at the Zuse-Institute Berlin, then at FU Berlin, working in cooperation with Tebis AG on curvature based modeling and design of curves and surfaces. I realized that I didn’t want to stay at university, though, so I looked for a different future.

When I came over a job offer from Trolltech, which just before opened a developer office in Berlin, I knew the name and their main product Qt only casually from Linux and the KDE Desktop. But they seemed to be a bunch of very competent and nice people, so I applied and, well, I became a happy troll, creating cool software for a living. And I can confirm that they are a bunch of very competent and nice people :).

In 2008, Trolltech was bought by Nokia, both for the cross-platform technology and the people. Qt became one of the foundations of Nokia’s developer offering: The Nokia Qt SDK, with me being one of the core developers and architects of the Qt Creator IDE.

We know what happened to Nokia in the meantime, and our division was sold to the Digia Group which had taken over the Qt licensing business from Nokia already before. Now a few years later still, Qt has its own company again, and I am still mostly working on Qt Creator.

In my spare time I love singing, performing music in different ways and archery.