PHP is not Java!

Unser QS-Manager im Zusammenhang mit Projektstatus:

"Die Ampel ist heilig".

In the last months people kept addressing me with ideas to outsource bigger projects to low-wage countries like india or china. I used to work with people from india during the good old new economy times and have made funny experiences. But this was some years ago (10?). Lars Jankowfski made the same experiences but he dared to try it out again. See his blog posts here and here and learn like mem, that things can change over time and it is always worth a second try...

I have been tagged by Andi Gutmans. So it seems, i need to tell seven things about myself that people don't know in order to not break the rules. Maybe they never wanted to but here we go:

1) My first computer program was a game. After starting, a prompt came, asking for a number between 1 and 100. If the number didn't match a random number, the computer echoed: "The number is too high" or "... too low". Then: GOTO 10 (I was introduced to computers by my friend Vitor back then). Later i coded some character based jump&run games where the "A" was haunted by the evil "O" while running over a landscape made out of inverse spaces.

2) I got a Sinclair ZX 81 on my 15th birthday. My first assembler programs were written by coding special characters into a REM line in ZX 81 basic and then jumping into the memory where this line was stored. Later i exchanged it against a "datasette" for my C64. The guy who got it, mounted it into his Ford Mustang to enhance motor control.

3) I designed a character set once, in order to display 64 characters per line with the good old C64 (in graphics mode). This was for a management system for the rankings in a horse riding tournament in my home town. The output was distributed to 10 green screen displays all over the place. I was called via the speaker system 12 times during the games to fix system problems. I was sooo famous!

4) Before i dived into the techno scene in frankfurt in the early 90s, i loved to listen to Simon and Garfunkel, Joan Baez and the like. Something changed me then...

5) When i first learned about "Compuserve" in the early 90s, i could not believe anyone would need such a network thing. I just did not see the usecase for such a network.

6) Everyone i ever drank a beer with knows: I once wrote a MS-DOS compatible operating system kernel in pure 80286 assembler. The infamous SDOS/286. We even had a newspaper ad for it in one of the early C't magazines. 30kb machine code done in 7 months by 2 people (24/7). That was the time when i learned to love the concept of pair programming. Eventually, a lawyer called us. He said his client (unnamed) could not believe that we got all this running without re-engineering Microsoft code. This lead to the end of this project...

7) During my studies i used to live in an appartment-sharing community with 11 other people in stuttgart downtown. These were the funniest 2 years in my life.

Again, to follow the rules, i am tagging the following people:

- Lars Jankowfsky has started quite some very interesting business initiatives using PHP as a technology. He is always around on conferences and pretends not to know too much about PHP, but he surely does...

- Rafi Yanai is a great C/C++ developer and helped me in countless skype conversations to fix complicated installation problems with Zend Platform. Nowadays he prefers climbing mountains. How i envy him...

- Hans Geeratz used to work with me in AGI. He knows a lot about web applications and the business itself.

- Xenjo has one of the coolest german lanugage blogs i know and is also a very good PHP coder and architect.

- Max Horwarth still tries to convince people that there is quality assurance in the PHP world. He should know better with his deep understanding of PHP though

- Justin B. Meyer is one of the authors of the javascriptmvc, one of the few javascript libraries that carry the name "framwork" not only for marketing reasons...

- Michael Mayer is an extremely talented and professional php and JS developer who goes the whole way to project success, even if it is sometimes long ans stony..

And here are the rules I'm supposed to pass on to the above bloggers:

* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some weird.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.