That's me

I am a physicist (diploma and PhD) and an IT allrounder with more than 20 years of professional experience. I have continuously been working with computers of different kinds since the advent of the Commodore 16 and 64 in the 1980s. I definitely prefer Unix and Linux over Windows, but since Windows 10 I made my peace with Microsoft’s operating system.

My current focus areas are cloud architecture and cloud infrastructure provisioning (mainly on AWS), deployment and management of containerised applications (Docker, Kubernetes) and Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD).

Recently I have started delving into the fascinating area of Quantum Computing.

I was born in 1972 in Wuppertal, in Germany, now I live with my family near the river Rhine between Düsseldorf and Cologne.

tl;dr

  • 1992-1999 University of Wuppertal
    • 1992-1997 Diploma in experimental physics
    • 1997-2000 PhD in theoretical physics, system administrator and scientific researcher
  • 2000-2003 Unix instructor - Sun Microsystems GmbH, Ratingen
  • 2003-today Vodafone GmbH, Düsseldorf
    • 2003-2013 from IT specialist to technical manager - IT Operations
    • 2013-2015 requirements engineer and business analyst - Digital Transformation
    • 2015-2018 data analyst - B2B Sales Support and Marketing
    • 2018-now technical manager - CoE CI/CD, Cloud and DevOps

University

Diploma (1992-1997)

I studied physics (with mathematics, electronic data processing and artificial intelligence as subsidiary studies) at the University of Wuppertal. My diploma thesis is about the thermal behaviour of high-temperature superconductor thin films exposed to high-frequency electromagnetic radiation. The generation of heat at small non-superconducting defects with normal electrical resistance may lead to a “quench” of the superconductivity. This unwanted phenomenon limits the use of superconductors as electronic HF components. My work was a mixture of laboratory experiments with superconducting thin films and numerical calculations of their thermal behaviour in high-frequency fields. For the latter I rewrote and improved existing Fortran 77 programs in C.

During this time I supervised student learning groups in mathematics and experimental physics.

Doctoral Degree/PhD (1997-2000)

For my PhD I changed subject and department within the University of Wuppertal and moved to the theoretical physics division. Our field of study was wetting phenomena, i.e. the microscopic distribution of liquids, at chemically and geometrically structured interfaces. This is a sub-area of thermodynamics and statistical physics (“physics of condensed matter”). One of the practical applications is a “chemical microchip”. We compared two different approaches, a non-local density functional theory and a simplified local interface deformation (“Extended Young-Laplace”) model. The complex integral and differential equations, respectively, cannot be solved exactly with pen and paper, we had to apply numerical calculations using C and the Numerical Algorithm Group (NAG) libraries.

At the theoretical physics department I earned my money by managing the department’s Unix workstations and servers, mainly SunOS/Solaris and Digital Unix. This and all the programming work during diploma and PhD laid the foundation for a lifelong IT career.

My final PhD examination was in December 1999, I continued to work as system administrator and scientific researcher until February 2000.

Professional experience

Sun Microsystems (2000-2003)

At Sun Microsystems (which is now part of Oracle) I worked as an instructor, teaching customers and other instructors (“train-the-trainer” lessons) all about Unix and Sun’s server systems: Unix fundamentals, scripting, Solaris system administration, server and storage maintenance and networking. Moreover, I was part of a small group of people developing Sun system administration certification exams.

Vodafone (2003-today)

Between 2003 and 2013 I worked in Vodafone’s IT Operations unit. My team was responsible for the application operations of sales, customer care and billing IT systems, in particular the applications used in the Vodafone stores.

Key achievements in these years were:

  • Wrote all deployment, monitoring and data load shell scripts for the applications used for “fuzzy” customer search, postal address and bank data validation
  • Designed and implemented a generic monitoring system, using Perl and PL/SQL programming
  • Created SLA and performance dashboards and real-time map displays of Vodafone shops’ sales activity, using PHP and JavaScript programming
  • Wrote operational concepts which were used as the basis for contracts with IT service providers and SAS70 auditing
  • Designed and implemented the IT infrastructure for the first Vodafone flagship store in collaboration with our shop operations service provider
  • Integrated parts of the IT system landscapes of Vodafone and Arcor

In 2013 I moved to a newly founded business unit “Digital Transformation”. I was a business analyst and requirements engineer, my team designed a new shop frontend (technical and user experience design), relaying between the Retail business and the IT delivery units.

From 2015 to 2018 I worked in B2B Sales Support and (following an internal reorganization) in B2B Marketing and Customer Value Management as a data analyst. My focus areas were analysis of customer data and sales KPIs in order to measure and maximise customer value, churn analysis, churn propensity modelling, analysis and modelling (prediction) of revenues, data selection for campaigns, creation of ad-hoc analyses, reports and visualizations, and finding recommendations on sales and customer relationship activities.

Since 2018 I am back in IT, working as a technical manager in the Center of Excellence (CoE) for CI/CD, Cloud and DevOps. The CoE evolved out of an IT unit originally responsible for deployment, change and release management, i.e. receiving software deliveries and rolling them out in test and production environments, as well as the provisioning of data center infrastructure - all of that in a world of legacy applications. With agile and DevOps methods arising, cloud infrastructure and CI/CD automation techniques become more and more important, and the CoE’s job today is to do research, give guidance and provide consultancy and design and implementation support in these modern topics.

Expertise

Specialized knowledge:

  • Unix and Linux, Unix shell scripting (+++)
  • Python (++)
  • Git, GitHub (++)
  • CI/CD tooling: Jenkins, Sonatype Nexus, Atlassian Bitbucket, digital.ai Release, JFrog Artifactory (+++)
  • Atlassian Jira and Confluence (++)
  • Amazon Web Services (+++)
  • Microsoft Azure (+)
  • Google Cloud (+)
  • Terraform (+++)
  • Docker (+++)
  • Kubernetes (++)
  • Microsoft Office and Office 365 (+++)
  • Networking, TCP/IP (++)
  • SQL and databases (++)
  • Tableau (++)

Area knowledge:

  • IT Operations and ITIL (+++)
  • IT Security (++)
  • Data analytics and visualization (++)
  • Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data (+)
  • IT Training (+++)
  • Technical documentation, solution designs and operational concepts (+++)
  • Telecommunications (+++)

In addition, this is what I’ve learned and used in the past, my knowledge now starts to fade away but could be refreshed at any time:

  • Programming languages: Perl, C, Java, Fortran 77, Pascal, Basic
  • Data analytics and statistics: R, RapidMiner, Knime
  • HTML, PHP and JavaScript
  • Oracle PL/SQL and Teradata SQL
  • TeX and LaTeX

Languages: fluid in writing, reading and speaking German (native language) and English

Certifications

  • Professional Scrum Master I
  • Professional Scrum Product Owner I
  • Certified SAFe 4 Practitioner
  • PRINCE2 Foundation
  • Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management
  • Sun Certified System Administrator for Solaris 9
  • Sun Certified Network Administrator
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
  • AWS Certified Security - Specialty
  • Microsoft Azure Fundamentals
  • Microsoft Azure Network Engineer Associate

Other fields of interest

  • Reading
  • Music and concerts, especially classic rock, progressive rock and metal
  • Playing the drums
  • Astronomy
  • Biology, especially Zoology and Cladistics
  • History
  • Philosophy
  • Sports: running, swimming, cycling and hiking
  • Middle-earth and the works of Tolkien
  • Family search and my own ancestry
  • Single Malt Scotch Whiskys