Keep on Climbing - Recap of 2015

It's the last day of 2015 and therefore time for the annual recap of the year. For me it was a great year, on the private side of life as well as the professional life.

I'm still working from home for one of the best interactive agencies in the world with a group of fantastic people. I'm happy that I got back into computer graphics programming this year being able to work in the emerging space of virtual reality with devices like the Oculus Rift, Google Cardboard, Samsung Gear VR and more. Plus the next chapter which is being opened with new innovations in the field of Augmented and Mixed Reality.
I was also able to do a few talks at conferences and honored to speak at the //build developer conference again this year, this time together with my good friend and colleague Laurent.
Oh, and I got promoted to Lead UX Developer as well in 2015.

It was also a great year in my private life. My wife and I had our 10 year wedding anniversary and I love her more every day. Our four daughters are doing fine in (pre-)school and bring us joy every day.
For me personally it was an intense change too when I decided in February 2015 that it's finally time to loose some weight. By now I lost about 35 kilograms (77 lbs) by decreasing the energy input with (unhealthy) food and increasing the energy output with cycling. I likely turned a few more kilograms from fat into muscles through the training as well. I did some sweet bike rides like a nice 113 km tour around Lake Washington and Lake Sammamish in October when I was in the Seattle area and another 100 km+ ride a few days ago climbing into the Erzgebirge (Ore Mountains). In December alone I managed to ride more than 500 km while climbing 5200 meters up. Glad I reached this point considering I had 35 kg more to carry when I started in February.

For the next year I want to reduce my weight just a bit more and I'm also planning to ride my first Mountainbike Cross Country Marathon, the famous Erzgebirge Bike Marathon and some other nice challenges.
In the tech field I hope to be renewed as Windows Platform Dev MVP and being able to work more in the field of VR, AR and MR. I have the feeling it's another UX revolution happening right now. It's an exciting time to be a developer for sure.

Bring it on 2016!

Moving on

Today was my last day at Schleupen AG. I worked there for 5 years as an enterprise developer mainly on back end and algorithmic topics, but also on the front end with .NET, Silverlight and more. We developed some really nice things there and I'm esp. proud of the parallel data processing pipeline which even works with .NET 2.
My co-workers were a great bunch of people, some became my friends and even the godfather of my youngest daughter and I became a godfather too. I thank them all for what I've learned and the great time we had. I wish them nothing less than the best for their future.

I started at Schleupen AG right after my studies and my diploma thesis "Parallelization and Optimization of an OpenGL CAD / CAM Application". I was always a computer graphics aficionado and passionate about physical simulation, image processing, computer vision, real-time computer graphics in general and interactive UIs with a great UX. Just for fun I started to work on some side projects, like this open source OpenGL fluid simulation in 2007, created a few open source libraries and also developed quite popular  Windows Phone apps such as Pictures Lab, Funny Faces, Helium Voice, Cloud Recorder and more. 

It's an exciting time to be a developer with so much things happening in this industry at the moment. Microsoft's own Surface tablets is just one piece we as software developers can leverage to shape the future. For me it's good fun to use these great new technologies like Windows Phone, Windows 8, WinRT, .NET, DirectX, XBox, Kinect, etc. to create nice experiences and I love to work on this all the time.
A few months ago I got an offer from IdentityMine and if you know their work, you can imagine that it was a no-brainer to accept this nice offer they made me. I'm really looking forward to work with state of the art technologies on exciting projects with experts like Laurent Bugnion and more great people. Another nice aspect of my new gig: I will work from my home office and will be closer to my 3 lovely daughters and wife. I will also be here during the last phase of my wife's pregnancy and can hopefully support her better. And yes, we're expecting our fourth child in September. :-)


Now I will enjoy a couple of days off with my family until I start my new job as Senior Interactive Developer at IdentityMine on July 2nd.