My name is Andreas Heil, I am a computer scientist and professional software engineer from Karlsruhe, Germany. I graduated in computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and received my doctoral degree in Web Engineering from the Chemnitz University of Technology in Germany.
I am a former developer at Microsoft and worked several years for Microsoft in Germany and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK. Our softest bits and bytes were showen to Bill Gates and Craig Mundie in person presented e.g. at Microsoft’s PDC and Microsoft’s TechFest. In addition, Mundie showed our stuff at Cornell and Harvard University as well as University of Wahsington.
I used to be software development manager for an international company offering consulting services and software products for SAP solutions and the support of business processes. Before I was working in the product development team of the leading software vendor for law companies in Germany, used to speak on conferences and tours and I am writing for the professional developer magazine dotnetpro in Germany. I (co)authored six patents and published a series of research papers in the field of Web Engineering, Service Infrastructure and User Interaction and published more than 60 articles in development magazines.
Eventually, I took over the responsibility as IT product manager for the area of enterprise application integration within the IT department of the largest retailer for cosmetics, healthcare, household products, and health food in Germany, dm-drogerie markt.
I am also visiting lecturer at the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University (DHBW) in Karlsruhe, Germany, teaching interactive systems as well as data structures and algorithms in computer science.
My blog covers mostly technical topics, which I consider interesting to learn and write about. I am writing most of the time to remember about what I learned and figured out, to to google for it later on. The typical scope ranges from hacks up to software engineering and computer science topics up to my current field of interest. All the opinions on the blog are my own and probably wrong at all.
I picked up computers when I was eight, used to have a modded C64, an Amiga 500 with one megabyte of RAM before switching to personal computers. I was already online last millennium, used to be a Fido Node and run the Spaceline BBS. I read a lot, speak German, English, some French and recently learned a bit of Swedish. Once I learned Assembler, C, Basic, Pascal, Perl, Visual Basic, Java, JavaScript, Processing but eventually, I was in .NET, mostly C#. Due to my former job, I also learning Python and dug into in-memory databases. In 2011, after leaving Microsoft, I switched to Mac, run Linux servers at home and are somewhat in the field of IoT and contributed to the openHab project. I now focus a lot in larger scale solutions, messaging systems and integrations solutions, all stuff, one could not do at home, quite well.
I tried out new things a lot, more often than not I used to be an early adopter, I am a gadgeteer and but also know well how to do build a house, as I did it. I do like Apple products a lot and know Star Wars by heart. I do like movies and SciFi series but find usually no time to watch them. I learn and study Karate-Do, mostly Shotokan but I am interested a lot in the traditional Okinawa-Te and Koryu Ushinadi. In addition, I study Kyusho-Jitsu (急所術). I have a wonderful spouse wife and a great son. I am vegetarian and no, I do not eat fish at all!
I am also on Facebook or Google+, Twitter or can be contacted using old-fashioned email as well.
Dr. Andreas Heil
Obere Bergstr. 22
76703 Kraichtal
Germany
mail: info [et] aheil.de
web: https://www.hack-the-planet.net/
cell: + 49 (0) 174 9045832
VAT identity number according to §27a of German VAT regulations: DE234137169