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. ZideOne ceased ♱ operations Jan 7th 2010. Don't ask ...
Currently: Since Jan 2010 I'm working for Apple doing magical secret projects I'm not allowed to talk about. Evar.
Family:
Not for adoption. I have an awesome spouse and two cute daughters:
a 8-year-old princess and a 1.6-year-old squaller.
My parents are Dr. Magrit Heß and Dr. Günter Heß.
Both are on pension now,
and are not medical doctors. The degree is somehow related to agriculture,
whatever ;->
Finally there is my older (but shorter ;-) brother,
Dr. Henry Hess.
Who carries the colorful title of
'Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering'
at the Columbia University, NYC.
You can bet he is the smartest ...