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A bit more about me

My first experience with a computer that I clearly remember was a laptop with a monochrome display, 286 intel cpu and 20 megabytes of storage, running only MS DOS. I remember playing Snake on that machine when I was about 8 years old.


When I was 12 I decided to learn HTML so I can make my own website. That ambition quickly grew to include server script scripting with PHP 3. That ambition again grew into two major community sites for a game called Clonk, for which I was creating custom content alongside during the years 2000 to 2005.


In 2011 Google payed me to work on phpMyAdmin, as part of their 'Google Summer of Code' program. I thoroughly enjoyed writing up database monitoring and analysing tools, which I have proposed myself to the phpMyAdmin team, as I wanted to have such tools for myself as well.


Once I've completed my bachelors degree in Software & Information Engineering in 2012 I tried my luck as a freelance software developer for Web- and iOS-Apps. That turned out to be a wortwhile endeavour, and it allowed me to continue working on on my own projects in my free time. It was also during that time I heavily played Minecraft with my Wife, which led me to Minecraft modding.


Near the end of 2015 I was hired by Hypixel to work on their standalone voxel game, and while definitely an interesting prospect, it was not the kind of game I wanted to create, also I love being independent ^_^;


So starting from 2016 I de-facto cancelled all my previous projects so I can focus entirely on creating a 3d sandbox voxel game named Vintage Story, which has become a commercial success in 2020, allowing me to focus entirely on game development.

 

For the last 20 years I have been continously developing various kinds of websites and offline applications in my free time. Suffice to say, I really love coding! For the coming years, I am looking forward to continue my efforts in making the world a tiny bit better through the software I create.

 

 

Skills

Stuff I have experience with:

  • Designing large scale software architectures
  • Databases and Software Security
  • Linux System Administration
  • Building Communities 
 
Hardware & Software:
  • 23+ years: PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML, Regular Expressions
  • 15+ years: jQuery, HTML5, Linux & Web Stacks
  • 8+ years: Java, C#
  • 2-3 years: C, iOS Apps (Objective-C)
  • 6 years: 3D Graphics (OpenGL, the rendering pipeline and GLSL)
  • 1 year: Assembler, Haskell

 

Spoken languages:

  • German (first language)
  • English (second language)
  • Latvian (basic)