Some History: Born in the former GDR on Sep 21st 1976 (birthday presents welcome). Started to play with GDR computer equipment as a teen (doing Assembler, Forth and Basic). Wall came down, got access to better hardware. First an Amiga 500, then an Amiga 3000UX. Learned programming on those machines: 68k Assembler, C, Modula-2, Oberon, Cluster. Started to look into Objective-C. YES, I really did Objective-C on Amiga, you can bet it was crap. Played with dial-up mailboxes/BBS on 14kbit modems. Went to a local ISP in ~1994 to talk them into connecting my school to the Internet. Found ~10 NeXTstations, a Cube and a guy playing with an Apple Newton. Obviously started to work there, got a NeXTstation. Stayed there doing various early-Internet things. Web-shops, CMS systems, etc. Wrote a billing system in WebObjects 2.0. Finished school, had to do 10 months military service (German Air Force). Started studying computer science, still working at MDlink. Won a German startup competition and used the money to become an MDlink partner. Did various iterations on the software called "SKYRIX web groupware" (initially developed as an Intranet solution for a multinational). Forked off the Skyrix part into an own venture, SKYRIX Software AG. Worked on developing Skyrix products and projects, managed a small and (initially ;-) motivated development team as the Skyrix CTO. Kicked off and implemented the first major OpenSource groupware project - OpenGroupware.org - in 2003. Did various now-OGo projects. Developed a massively scalable variant (ScalableOGo). Sold my MDlink stock. Switched from the Skyrix management to the advisory board in 2006. Became a freelance consultant/developer in 2006 and worked on a few interesting projects. Together with Nat! I founded ZideOne on Dec 1st 2008 to develop a MAPI message store provider implementing the CalDAV, CardDAV and GroupDAV protocols.
An announcement on the plans for the future is still pending, sry ;-)
Family:
Not for adoption. I have an awesome spouse and a very cute 5-year-old
daughter.
My parents are Dr. Magrit Heß and Dr. Günter Heß.
My mother has a small business related to plant decoration while my father
is on pension.
Both are not medical doctors, the degree is somehow related to agriculture,
don't ask.
Finally there is my older (but shorter ;-) brother,
Dr. Henry Hess.
Now carries the colorful title 'Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering'
at the Columbia University, NYC.
You can bet he is the smartest ...