I am living together with my wife, Anke:

and my Daughter, as well as our two cats, Zotti & Rocky, in Berlin-Friedrichshain. We are moving into our new home in Hamburg end of 2017 in our house in Hamburg.

I was born and grew up in the beautiful city of Hamburg(Germany). After school I moved to Kiel for my studies, mayored in Mathematics and minored in Physics. I was mainly interested in the area of pure Mathematics, more precise: Algebra and even more precise: finite group theory. Later I relocated to Cologne in order to write a Ph.D. thesis in applied Mathematics, namely: cooperative game theory. Back then it was time to get my head a bit out of the theory and get some practice in the “real world”. Hence I applied in mid of 2012 for a job labled as Business Intelligence Manager within a small travel online advertising start-up named travel audience. I had no clue what was going on in the area of online advertising nor I had a clue of Business Intelligence. Hence I applied with the message “Job offer sounds cool. I have none of the required skills but I am a smart guy and can learn all that is needed quickly.” They hired me nevertheless – or was it because of that?
Back in these days I was employee number 4 or 5 and I had the opportunity to grow together with the company – and I did. From juggling around reports and making some sense out of the data I grew into the position Head of IT and grew an international team of developers, system administrators, project- and product managers, data scientists & analysts to a size of 35 people.
After 4 years with travel audience I decided to focus on real estate investments and made a switch back to the startup world in early 2018. Since then I am building a brand new startup under the umbrella of a company builder named Liquid Labs.

Some changes made me move to another company builder named better group from 04/19 onwards.

The first games I played were these handheld portable games during the 1980s. Then later I played Super Mario Bros (yes, the very first) on a Nintendo Entertainment System that was located in a waiting area of a shoe store in a shopping mall (weird location Oo). I owned one of the old big fat Game Boys, my mother bought an Atari ST 1040 around 1988/89 and obviously I played also on it. One of my favorite games back then was Giana Sisters, I think. I had a Sega Mega Drive in the early 90s and around 1995/6 one of the first Play Stations and my first PC. After that I owned a N64, a Game Cube, a Wii, a PS2, PS3, PS4 and several gaming PCs.

My first serious gaming started with Counter Strike in the beta before 2000. Back then around 2001 I joined a Counter Strike Clan (“The Fusion Clan“)  filled up with some old retards that I still call friends 15 years later. Back in these days Steam was not yet born. Hence we all have Steam accounts from day one since Steam was introduced. We spent a lot of time in optimizing our team play in order to compete in first versions of leagues of the Electronic Sports League. After several years of playing CS I was introduced into my first MMORPG in 2005/6 – World of Warcraft. This game completely sucked me in! I really took this game serious and the competitive nature of raiding just overwhelmed me. Hence I joined a raiding guild (“System of a Wipe“) and because of me having issues with authority, I took over the guild- and the raid lead of this guild. I shipped this guild through all ups and downs a 25-man raiding guild of up to 50 people can have and led it for something around 7 years in total.

After quitting WoW I started playing Hearthstone and a bit later the follow up on CS: Counter Strike Global Offensive which I both play today. Besides a bunch of single player games like Dishonered, the Mafia series or survival games like The Long Dark, Rocket League grabbed my attention and eats a lot of my time nowadays.

In 2004 I had my first touch points with Linux by installing Mandrake/Mandriva on an old computer while I was a student. Since then I always wanted to replace Windows and kick it out of my life. Sadly the criticism that gaming under Linux was not a great XP was very true in these days. But: a lot has changed since then. I always had a dual boot system to still be able to enjoy my favorite games and finally I switched completely to Linux in early 2014. Since then there is no Windows in my house anymore. After using Arch and Debian, I ended up being quite happy with Ubuntu for some years. Since 2017 I switched to Manajro and am running an Arch-based system again. Thanks to Steams initiative to bring games to Linux, it is nowadays more or less painless to play most of the games I want to play natively under Linux. The remaining ones I get to run through wine (like e.g. Hearthstone or other Blizzard games).

I contribute with some articles about my gaming on Linux to games4linux.de – a german Linux gaming news site. You can see a list of my articles here.

Gaming PC :

• AMD Ryzen 9 3900X @ 3.8 GHz
• 64 GB DDR4-3200 RAM
• MSI MEG X570 ACE Mainboard
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
• 3x 1 TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD
• 4 TB SATA SSD (Crucial)
• 10 TB HDD (WD Red)
• Fractal Design R6-C case
• 2 x 27″ Dell s2716dg running at WQHD @ 144 Hz + GSYNC
• Corsair K70 RGB with Cherry MX silent
• Roccat Kone XTD Mouse

Work Laptop Dell XPS 13 :

• Intel Core i7-6560U
• 16 GB RAM
• 512 GB SSD

Home Server :

• details soon

LAN Party PC:

• AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
• 16 GB DDR4-3200 RAM
• Gigabyte B450 Mainboard
• Nvidia GeForce GTC 1080 Ti
• 1x 1TB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD
• 2 TB SATA SSD (Crucial)
• 2x 10 TB WD Red HDD

Back when I was a very young guy I joined the boy scouts in Hamburg (DPBH). We went on smaller and bigger trips all across Europe, hiking, riding bike, canoeing our way through nature. With me moving away from Hamburg I left also the boy scouts but my love for outdoor trips remained. The last two bigger trips my wife and I made are hiking for two weeks in the black forest and doing a canoe tour of 2.5 weeks through the Dalsland (a part of South-Sweden).

The beauty among our outdoor gear is our tent, a Hilleberg Kaitum 3 GT: