christof
Christof got a Sinclair ZX 81 in 1982 at age of 12. That got upgraded to 16 Kbytes. From there on to Sinclair Spectrum, Atari 600XL, Commodore C=64. Skipped the 16 bit home computers and jumped to a 80286 AT with 12 MHz and turbo switch. Did the upgrades via 80386SX, 80486, Pentium with bug, ... got a bit bored with the hardware race. BASIC, Assembler, Turbo Pascal, Prolog, C, C++, Java, Python and lately Scala. Votes for using the right tool for the job.
Originally mainly interested in games, game development, gaming, game graphics, and tried to focus on computer graphics algorithms. Did study computer science, then first job turned out developing medical application software for radiation treatments and brain surgery. Switched at some time to work on asset management for computer game production, wrote production management software for special effects movies.
Joined conject to work together with talented people, who are striving for mastery in their trade.
Last week I not only finally managed to get my beloved reading lamp repaired, of course an Artemide Tolomeo 
, but also to utilize the newly provided cozily, brightly, and energy-savingly lit space to finish the book I had started the week before. And because I am excited about it, let me share my excitement with you:
The book title “Scrumban” is the combination of Scrum and Kanban, two management methods. Scrum is one of the predominant inhabitants of the Agile management method zoo, while Kanban originates from the lean management revolution attributed to the car manufacturer Toyota. >> more…
This is a short article I write because it would have saved me some significant time had I been able to google it (no time-travel google (yet) – find articles you will write in the future). So maybe somebody in the future will find this useful .
What we were doing is to use a Microsoft Business Intelligence/Reporting Server to report on data in an Oracle production database.
Creating the OLAP cubes in the MS system, everything worked fine until I tried to pull in aggregate data over a date field from the database, giving me the mysterious “Not a legal OleAut date” error message that can be found in the various forums, but none in the context of OLAP cubes. >> more…
It can happen more quickly than you think… even in environments which seem to follow an architectural role model, some dusty corners remain.
We are running an MS SQL Server Reporting Services server for some internal reports on the Oracle production database. Nice enough report generator. Now, I have done more than just some MS Access in prehistoric times, and constantly feel reminded of that “put these 120 line SQL query into the puny little properties textbox and it will do what you want” type of development. Things have definitely improved over that with MS Visual Studio 2008 and the report designer, but then, without prior notice, I was struggling with Visual Basic… >> more…
When switching companies, it is usually hard if not impossible to find out in what culture you will end up. You do the job interview, or today rather multiple instances of interviews, meet the people, show what you have done and what you can do, but usually they will not show what they can do. I wonder why, and have had some nasty surprises in the past. They might show you around the office, demonstrate the table football, show you the Wii and the lounge, but I have never seen that you get to see their source code. Wouldn’t that be even more important?
As software developer, you focus more on the code, the architecture, the tools, the inspiring and ingenious desings around you. So why not demonstrate what a cool company you could be joining by showing you the self-explanative code, the well-founded architecture, the smooth continous build system and how little build breakages are there, for you to work with? I think this tells a lot about your potential future colleagues and their skills, and obviously also whether you will be spending the next months implementing new features or cleaning up their stuff. >> more…