About Me
My name is Michael Jansen and i am an it consultant from germany.
How it all began
My first contact with computers came sometime in the eighties with a commodere vc20 my father bought. It definetely got me interested into computers. I started to develop a vocabulary trainer in basic.
Next came an amiga 500 bought with my first self earned money. And that one burned holes into my budget. Feed up with playing on it i started coding in basic, assembler (k-seka), modula-2, c. When that computer got old i somehow drifted away from programming.
Getting into the business
My first experiences with real software development came years later during a semester break job at a local life insurance company in 1996. When that 2 month job was done they offered me a fixed time employment starting with the beginning of 1997. I had impressed them with programming a lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet instead of simply filling in those big packs of numbers printed out on paper. They needed some help with the development of their management system destined to replace their old host based system. A major undertaking as time would tell. My days at the university were counted with my decision to accept that job. It started as a fixed 6 month employment, but i left 3.5 years later in the midst of 2000.
The next year was spent with some c++ hacking for a system vendor (DEBIS).
Working as a freelancer
After 4.5 years in the business i decided to test the market as a freelancer. My first contract would start to lead me away from developing. I was contracted to reimplement a grown set of perl scripts implementing a developer workflow over rational clearcase. In the next 14 month i learned everything about rational clearcase i needed to stay in that business since then. At the end i decided to move on and go back to my roots.
My first employer hired me as a contractor again. I helped them to finish their migration to their new system. Finally. That contract would go 7 month and ended in July 2003.
After that came mostly jobs as configuration manager. Most notably my to turns a t-online. All in all 35 month i was responsible for the rational clearcase based branching and source control in a project that had 30-50 developers over the time. That project had time based deployment dates. As the release date came the powers that be would decide which features would be part of it. My job was to ensure that would work and nothing got lost during merges. So i singlehandedly juggled with nearly 30-40 branches in parallel belonging to up to 3 different development streams ( different releases ). That was an interesting time.
Today
All in all it seems i lost that developer feeling. That's why i recently begun contributing to the KDE project.
Anything else?
When i'm not sitting in front of a computer i read, work out or play table-soccer.
Enjoy yourself
Mike
