Who is writing
Born in Germany in 1979, I pursued a career in music in the early 90ies. I made some international fame as the musician of an award winning and acclaimed demo group. I then went on to study music and computer science at the University of Dortmund, while working part time at another university to actually learn how to program.
2005 I moved to Canada for my fiancée Alison and to work on Shopify. I fell in love with Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) and saw Shopify grow from a tiny startup to a reputable company.
At the end of 2006 I picked up a camera and got hooked to taking photographs. I started snapping away at the usual, you know cats & trees and in the spring of 2007 incidentally started to take more pictures of people. I thought human faces were so much more fascinating than inanimate objects so I stuck to taking pictures of living things since.
The Present
I work with the absolutely fantastic and unbelievably talented crew at Shopify as their CDO and am responsible for managing its design team, its good looks and UI&UX design.
Regarding my ongoing passion for photography, I specialize in beauty & fashion photography and my work can be seen in international publications as well as on reputable agency sites such as Elite, Ford, Major, Next, Giovanni & Sutherland.
Things that didn't fit in my bio
- I like to stay active. I have a thing for playing soccer, volleyball, rock climbing, sailing & hiking.
- My first foreign language was Latin and I am currently learning my fifth (Korean)
- I used to work in a forensic psychiatric ward
- There is a shelf at my parent's house filled with trophies ranging from Kung-Fu, international board game championships to fishing (i was a very competitive kid)
- In high school I attended philosophy class
- I used to have really long hair and played gigs with a Gothic Metal Band wearing leather pants
- It took me 10 years longer to beat my mom in GO than it took me to beat my dad in chess
- I was a game master at Germany's most infamous Live Action Role Playing series "Slaves to Darkness"
- My sister is more intelligent than I am (she's got an MD and all that stuff and they wanted her at Harvard)
- I played a number of video games competitively
- I performed twice in "Der Mond", an opera by Carl Orff
- At the age of 14, I used to play private piano concerts at a castle and my piano teacher came from a heritage line of students that could be traced back all the way to Franz Liszt
- I snapped a string in my parent's piano while practicing a prelude by Rachmaninoff
- Since I was bored in grade 10 I missed 160 hours of school that I spent playing chess in a nearby café
- I love coffee