That's me. Meanwhile I got elder. Hair more grey. So you know how I looked like about 10 years ago. But you still don't know me as a person. I'll try to introduce myself with this site.

When I began with my studies at Technische Univerität Berlin in 1975, it took me 3 years and two subjects of study, namely Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering, until I found my passion with Information Technology. Honestly, these first three years I didn't do much else than sitting in front of card punchers (yes, I'm that old) and later CRTs. Afterwards it took me 6 more years of studying IT, simply because working in projects and earning money as a poor student was more important and fascinating than taking lectures. Probably I'd still be in university if not a group of other IT students decided to finalize. So I joined them, finalized and started doing real business.

At Siemens AG in Munich I continued working on mainframes. But they had shrunken to the size of small refrigerators. However, they hosted a whole BS2000 with an underlying VM/370 CP which I had to tune. After nearly 2 years the product was up and ready for the market. Unfortunately the market was not ready for mini-mainframes. So I had to switch to SINIX mirror disk drivers programming for another year.

I also found my later wife at Siemens since she was a trainee and I had to coach her.

Working for IST GmbH in Darmstadt I developed a high rack warehouse controller (for Windmöller & Hölscher) and worked also on a number of other projects. Very challenging to see a machine of some tons weight and almost 30 meters height travel as a result of a program written by me!

Then I decided to start something completely different and worked for Software AG as supporter - without even knowing one of their software products. Probably that can't be compared to the hotlines today since we had to do first and second line support. From that time I learned how to listen to customers.

The next 5 years I worked for Transport-, Informatik- und Logistik-Consulting GmbH in Wiesbaden, a former daughter of Deutsche Bahn AG. A lot of different projects: consulting, project management. Most of it for Deutsche Bahn, but also some large international projects for Scandlines, the Romanian Railways and the Bulgarian Railways. I learned a lot about pitfalls in project management. Luckily not in all cases by falling in.

The following interlude with Megatron Data Services GmbH where I worked for Commerzbank was interesting since I had my first real contact with UML when using Rational Rose in projects.

The next years I worked for SAPERION still as employee. One of the company co-founders was a colleague from Technische Univerität Berlin. We coincidentally met again - probably as a fact of the then increasing use of the internet. Me and my family moved to the Berlin area where we still live.

I always played with the idea to work self-employed. But there were always good jobs as employee. Finally in 2006 I took that step. And after less than two months I had my first project.

Since then I have been working for De Gule Sider and Maersk in Copenhagen as a contractor for Steria Later as a contractor in a SOA project for Volkswagen in Milton Keynes, UK. And until my cancer caused break I introduced Enterprise Architect for a division of Bombardier. Recently I jumped in at Volkswagen to support their development of a company-wide UML profile to support documentation in vital areas.

Also, mainly during my cancer break, I started as author for several books about Enterprise Architect. People might know my synonym qwerty in the Enterprise Architect Forum. Funny that I am with this forum since 2004. It feels like yesterday. Just my cheers from the beginning turned more into complaints. But that's a different story.