Joining itemis
Effective February 1st, 2008, I left my former employer and joined itemis.
There are many reasons for this step, and I don't want to go into too much detail, so here are the two most important ones:
First of all, I had to do a lot of travel in my recent position at Gentleware. Actually, I like traveling quite much - as you get around interesting places and meet a lot of interesting people - especially if you are a software architect (which is a synonym for "information hub" 
). However, with three small children, this meant a lot of hassle and tears. Wrong timing, one might argue. Maybe I'll hit the road again when the kids are older. The new position does not require that much traveling, so I'll be at home most evenings which is great for my family (and also for me).
As you may know, itemis is quite committed to Model Driven Software Development (MDSD). The majority of projects they work on rely on MDA/MDSD technology. Not only is itemis a user of model driven technology, but also do they heavily contribute to open source projects in this area. Itemis employees are committers on projects like openArchitectureWare, Eclipse Modeling Project and Fornax. Since the company management has identified "innovation management" as one of their top duties, they consequently launched a new branch office in Kiel with a group of employees who are dedicated to working on open source modeling tools. As working on open source projects is something I really enjoy and since I believe model driven development is a very hot topic, I decided to switch companies and join this team.
I learned a lot at Gentleware and am very grateful for the experiences I was able to make there.
Now, I am looking forward to creating the upcoming version 5.0 of openArchitectureWare together with my colleagues (Sven Efftinge, Jan Köhnlein, Dennis Hübner, Torsten Krohn) here in Kiel. Expect to hear exciting things in the following weeks and months. We started a team blog you might want to subscribe to: http://apps.itemis.de/roller/itemislabkiel
PDE team does cloning
In case you wonder why the PDE team is so productive, have a look at this image:
In expectation of BugDay July 2007, the PDE team have cloned Chris Aniszczyk!
If you want to lend a helping hand on BugDay, do not hesitate - it's easy. The teams have selected some bugs which are easy to solve. Browse this list, claim a bug and provide a patch. Or, if you do not have time for debugging code and creating patches: triage some bugs.
Three things about me you might be surprised to hear about…
Thanks to Michael, it's about time to let you know that...
- I started my programming career at the age of 12, when my father bought a Phillips MSX home computer. It had a very slick looking case, and you could write programs in some ancient version of Microsoft Basic.
- When I was 18, I worked in a cinema. Back then, we were using Ernemann film projectors. My duty was to start the film and to crossfade from one projector to the other one as soon as you could see a white spot in the upper right area of the screen. Here is a detailled description of how it works exactly.
- A red umbrella (of the Knirps brand) played a major role in getting to know the girl who is now my wife. I lost that umbrella at a friend's birthday party. When I wanted to fetch the umbrella some days later, that friend was on holiday, but Anne was there to hand out the umbrella. I guess we both would never have thought fetching that umbrella would take so long - we spent the whole day together.
Leaving Lufthansa Systems
I am leaving Lufthansa Systems to join Gentleware.
I joined Lufthansa in August 1996, when I started my studies in computer sciences at Nordakademie, Elmshorn. After finishing my studies in early 2000, I started my career as a software engineer with Lufthansa Systems. My first team developed a tool that helped administrators to install Windows PCs unattended. Most of the code was written in Delphi and DOS Batch. After 1 year, I had the opportunity to join another team who were writing enterprise applications in Java. Although I had never written a single line of Java code before, I was given the chance to join the team (mostly because I had some experience with distributed systems and CORBA). The team was rather small when I joined (only three developers, including me, and one boss), but grew up to 15 developers in about 2 years. We had some good fun writing J2EE applications (and frameworks).
In 2004, I was looking for a tool thet helped me to quickly create a Struts-based application and came across AndroMDA. This was an important step on my way into the world of model driven software development. I started using AndroMDA in my J2EE projects, and soon started contributing patches to AndroMDA. Sortly after, I was invited to join AndroMDA as a committer.
Gentleware is a well-known company in the realm of modeling tools and I first met Gentleware's CEO Marco Boger at JAX 2004 when Matthias Bohlen and I gave a talk on AndroMDA. In 2006, Gentleware were looking for a Software Architect to join their team and help them to further develop their new Eclipse based roundtrip engineering tool Apollo.
My main areas of work in my new job will be to help make Apollo a great UML tool that integrates with model driven approaches like MDA and MDSD. Also, I will serve as a Software Architect on J2EE projects.
If you happen to be at OOP 2007 in Munich, just drop by the Gentleware booth and say hi. I will be there not only to present Apollo and Poseidon (our modelling tools), but also to give a talk on Open Source MDA.
A message for you from earth
Alex Blewitt from EclipseZone posted a news entry earlier the day regarding the popularity of EclipseZone. In his post, he featured a service called GeoGreeting. GeoGreeting is using Google Maps to generate texts. Go and have a look yourself, it's cool.
Summer splash
If you're feeling this summer is way to hot and need to cool down try out this cute flash game. Great music, nice graphics and thrilling action - cool! Would you dare jumping down a 10 meter platform like this in real life?
Jonas Aaron is here!
Today at 3:26 in the morning, Anne gave birth to Jonas Aaron Friese, our third son. Both are well (and a little bit tired).
You, LORD, brought me safely through birth, and you protected me when I was a baby at my mother's breast.
From the day I was born, I have been in your care, and from the time of my birth, you have been my God.
(Psalm 22, 9+10)
The Daily .WAV
Looking for some cools sounds to spice up your Windows? Have a look at The20Daily20.WAV, they've got plenty of cool sounds mainly from movies and TV shows. I found it because I was googling for a sounds featuring Marvin (the paranoid android from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy). The Daily .WAV has quite some sounds from the "Guide" - get them here!
Google Earth rocks!
In the german news magazine "Der SPIEGEL", I read a quite promising article about Google Earth. Today, I gave it a try and was impressed by the smoothness of the tool right away. Here is a file that shows you where I have lived so far.
