About ...

About ... Me

I am a Software Engineer with a focus on internet technologies. My specialty are client/server architectures and high performance web applications. More recently I have also done some custom web design but so far any frontend work remains a hobby. Ask for my resume if you need more detail.

After a few exciting years in the heart of Silicon Valley, including six years at Google, I am now taking a sabbatical to catch up on all the things that normal people seem to do - I travel a lot, take tons of pictures, prepare my own food, do sports, learn a language, read the paper, and try out any new gadget or web technology that comes my way.

I have lived in Germany, California, Germany again, Poland, and, most recently, in the UK. It' not that I like moving so much, but I love the thrill of moving to a new country. For example, one of the best jobs I ever had was an eight months assignment with the then newly founded Google office in Krakow.

About ... This Site

This site is my personal playground. It doesn't matter so much what's on here, although I try to add at least some interesting content rather than a number of "test this feature" and "test that button". However, the primary purpose of this site is to allow me to try out some of the web 2.0 technologies I have been playing with over the last few months.

Now, why do I need a playground if I am a professional developer? The answer is simple: Yes, I was - and still am - a software engineer. I earned my bread and butter implementing web technologies. I love IT and I love my gadgets. However, while I was working, I never quite found the time to try out anything outside of my current project. As a result I knew any company internal publishing framework, yet didn't have a personal web page. Heck, I didn't even have a personal mobile phone!

Well, since I am currently not working professionally (did I mention I am taking a sabbatical?) I have no more excuse and so I now spend a significant portion of my time "playing around" with various tools and frameworks. This site is the result of my play time. Most of it is currently implemented using Drupal but might get rewritten at any time in line with my newest experiments.

About ... This Domain Name

A few years ago, when I started to tell my friends that I was thinking of taking a sabbatical, the reaction was always the same: "You, not work? Yeah right...What would you do? Become a Lady of Leisure? Haha."

Well, as it turns out they where right in one aspect. It certainly took me much longer than expected to make the jump and when I finally did, I still had a hard time leaving a great company and a job I liked. However, much to everybody's surprise I do enjoy my new life and so I now carry the label Lady of Leisure with pride, even though it started as a joke.

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