At UBS Investment Bank I was participating in the development of a securities lending system for allocating and invoicing securities lending income to UBS pool lending customers. The application core is written in Java with large parts written in Sybase Transact-SQL accessed from Java via JDBC. I took part in all aspects in the development beginning at the early evaluation phase until going live into production.

From 1998 to 1999 I worked at the Internet start-up company WebSentric in Munich as one of two core developers of WebPresenter, a presentation editor (Power Point clone) written in Java. To get an impression about WebPresenter please take a look at these these screen-shots.

I am the developer of Jacob and Timelog. You may can get an overview about these and some other of my Java applications and servlets at my personal Java page. Jacob is a Java class and package browser, which interacts with Emacs for editing. It is like a small IDE too, it enables you to include and exclude source files very easily, as well as create classes with the help of a dialog. It supports configuration management with RCS and make and lets you count lines of code of your project sources.

The Java technologies I am familiar with are:

• Swing Api
• RMI
• Servlet API
• JDBC (Sybase, InstantDB, MySQL, Oracle)
• Object Store PSE for Java (ODBMS)
• JavaCC (for lexical analysis and parsing)
• Xalan/Xerces
• Layout-Managers (including building new ones)
• Custom ClassLoader
• Object Serialization (via byte stream or XML)
• Jython
• LiveConnect

Java is my exclusive programming language/environment of choice since September 1995. The software for my diploma thesis, a soccer simulator using neuronal networks (Kohonen feature maps), is also written in Java.

XSLT

XSLT is my preferred way of formatting and generating all kinds of text, XML, and HTML output. Invocation of the Xalan XSLT transformer is nicely encapsulated inside my reusable ccl Java library for easy usage e.g. in servlets.

My XSLT knowledge is far from expert level and I am still struggling for a clean structure and proper documentation of my stylesheets, but you can take a look at my personal XSLT FAQ to get an idea where I am. I also don't hesitate to invoke Java from a stylesheet if it decreases the development time.

For my project at UBS Warburg I developed a framework where the team wrote all documentation in XML files which where then compiled using XSLT to HTML. This made writing documentation very easy and browsing in the highly connected documentation very fast (no comparison to a collection of unrelated word documents).

Software Engineering

Right now I am trying to program while consciously thinking about what and when to refactor (ala Fowler). Together with pair programming and other eXtreme Programming practices I am happy with this style now and am seeing good results.

Before that I experimented to generate source code in a Literate Programming fashion embedding pieces of source code together with verbose documentation inside XML files and generating HTML documents and SQL and Java source code out of it. But I stopped doing so, since I missed too many useful development tools which could not make use of these XML files. But I would use this technique again for very hard programming problems where I would have to study the application domain intensively at the same time.

I am familiar with object oriented methodologies (Coad, Jacobson, Rumbaugh, Booch, UML) and tools (Rational Rose).
I try to integrate as many elements as possible of Humphrey S. Watts' Personal Software Process (PSP) into my daily working habits. While it is hard to apply this to work in a team project, it helped me a lot to estimate the size and time it takes to write my own code.

Strengths

• Self motivated
• Self learner
• Believe in peer coaching and pair programming
• Believe in teams (at least that's what sport has taught me)

Tools

Before the Java age started I used the following programming languages (in backward chronological order):

• Windows
  • Perl
  • Visual Basic
  • Visual C++
    (MFC just a little to learn it, Win SDK to hack a little macro recorder and I used VC++ to do some small stuff Visual Basic can't do)
• DOS
  • Borland C++
  • Assembler
    (device driver for a Panasonic juke box and a TSR hack to start another DOS application on time)
  • Turbo C
• Amiga 1000
  • Assembler
  • Amiga Basic
• C64
  • Assembler
  • Basic

Smalltalk, Miranda (a functional programming language), TPAL (Turing Processor Assembly Language), Lisp, Prolog, Fortran, Logo, Forth.