About me
May 9th, 2008
My name is Daniel Wirtz and I am a computer science student at Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (since 2009, formerly Aachen University of Applied Sciences), Germany.
Besides studying I am the creator of Rockz.com (formerly Schlach.com), an early online community (and kind of social network) that I started somewhen in 2001 just for fun while attending school. The former hobby project powers about 200.000 mostly young members by now located all around germany. The chat application developed for this plattform makes use of all the recent buzzword technologies – however, it’s up and running in production since 2002 without much modification. Take a look if you like but beware, it’s all german. Currently I’m preparing to switch the whole platform to virtunity, a brand new full featured “web 2.0″ community system. Until now, about seven years of feedback and two years of hard work are contained in this beautiful piece of software :-).
To go a little further: I started playing around with Quick Basic instead of killing pixels in Commander Keen very early, played with Turbo Pascal at school and gathered some experience for a project using Delphi besides. When I first got an internet connection, I quickly adopted the LAMP stack and started building web applications in PHP3/4. As a result of some of them becoming popular I mutated to an alround problem solver and optimizer running this stuff on a bunch of clustered cheap linux boxes. At the halfway mark I also stumbled over Java for implementing the more complex server-side stuff because implementing ancient Comet with the PHP socket extension was… ;-). Later on I worked with C and Prolog at the university – and as you can see, I’m still alive. However, most of the time I caught myself developing web applications in Java and PHP on both server- and client-side decorated with some moderate CSS and JavaScript deployed on our small Debian Linux farm. A rather classic story so far.
Anyway, my reason to start this blog was, that I also found me roaming around a bunch of open source projects, still in quest of my ultimate destiny. There are so many interesting projects around buzzword web apps, grid computing, programming and networking frameworks, full stack application servers etc. out there, that I cannot decide where to invest my time so that I definitely required a blog to keep my thoughts on-line.
For now, I’m curious what comes next :-).
Imprint:
Daniel Wirtz
An der Zikkurat 4
53894 Mechernich, Germany
Phone: (+49) 180 / 58 03 00 30 243
Fax: (+49) 180 / 50 20 225 2358