Gerstrongs personal life

All discussion about the Commander Genius project (a Keen interpreter + more).
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gerstrong
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Gerstrongs personal life

Post by gerstrong »

Hello,

now it's time for some personal life. I tend not talk to much about so this is going to be short, yeah short, because my life had a lot of events making me of who I am.

I was born in Germany lived some time as a kid there. I always was interested in computer stuff and at age of 6 we had a Commodore 64. I never learned to program on it and even having a book I tried, but never caught the way in how to do it. I think, I was a bit to young for it. We had a lot of games for that system though.

Some time later I had the opportunity to leave the country because my father was a bit upset of the goverment. I think it is very common that people complain and he tried to start a new life. The decision was to go to Mexico.

I learned latin spanish and had a nice life as teenager there. Fortunately I met a lot of cool people I really appreciate up to this day. I still liked computers and the people I met, which were our neighbours having four kids and all older than myself and already visiting the university, I learned a lot of them. I also had the chance to get hands on software others hadn't. Thanks to them and my father I also learned to program in C. I knew a bit about HTML, Basic and so on, but why wish was to learn a powerful language.

I asked my friends, severals, what would be a good language to learn and they all agreed for C. Well, than I wanted to learn that langauge and my father bought me to 12th birthday of mine a book about learning C in 21 days ... what a promise! I learned a lot from that book and yeah, I was at school, strangely my grades also got better when I learned that language, especially in math though I hadn't that many problems at school. I think some of you readers had that experience at similar way.

I never was interested in C++. I have to say nobody really could explain why to use it. I was satisfied with C and using Turbo C by Borland I was able to pull off a lot of things like GUIs that didn't really work or primitive stuff to calculate something. It just was fun for me.

Also a lot of MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes) were base to practice, but I never understood, why MFC was so essential. There were other ways and at this I always had doubt about Windows. I didn't like MFC that much altough it made building GUIs pretty easy. I felt it was big and slow...

My friends showed me Linux then and other stuff in between. I started to look at Mandrake and Redhat Linux 6 as of 1998. It was the year nich which I have to say it was pretty exciting. Too bad that a lot of the stuff didn't run on my hardware. To get sound and video working it was a pain in the ass. Without internet conecction which I got much later, it was even harder to pull something off.

After that, well, I had only Windows software and wine was immature for me. I got FreeDOS with Doom running at some point but having a perfectly working Windows 98, why would I use Linux for production I asked. So at was more of a playground. I didn't understand the stuff about licences, so I didn't care about that neither.

I just had some CDs of Linux. It still showed, that this would be the future and I have to agree. It didn't get to be the present, it still remains of what it is, but since then, the hardware support is much better now. Linux is at a usable state in my opinion but I understand that others prefer using Windows, MacOS X and whatever exists. The cool thing there is that there are lot of alternatives nowadays.

After 9 years of living in Mexico at lot of stuff changed in my personal life and having had trouble in mexico, specifically family stuff, I decided to return to Germany, especially because of my future. Studying in Mexico wasn't my wish anymore and I started to study mechanical engineering at the TU Darmstadt (Maschinenbau). Later on I met more people never got that adapted to the society as I had my rules and at some point moved about 20 times in my whole life.

Some time in this between I changed the university to study at Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) being at the center of Ruhrpott and there I somehow got the need and inspiration to program something awesome. I found CloneKeen and the rest of the story you might know, by now or check the History Topic of Commander Genius.

I used C++ very little, but I saw the CloneKeen project as a opportunity to use C++ more and OOP in general terms so I really started to learn a lot of it. With help of Albert I really got hooked up with that language.

Nowadays I work at the university at a department called "Energy Plant Technology". It's really nice, although the guys programming their projects obviously think a bit different regarding computer science and how to get most out of it. In this between I got my M.Sc. for Mechanical Engineering.

Commander Genius between other smaller projects remain as some sort of hobby up to today...
Having fun developing stuff...
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Levellass
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Post by Levellass »

Keeners: Better, smarter, faster.
What you really need, not what you think you ought to want.
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lemm
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Location: canada lol

Post by lemm »

Are you making a CloneKeen documentary Gerstrong?
gerstrong
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Post by gerstrong »

lemm wrote:Are you making a CloneKeen documentary Gerstrong?
Sort of. I think some people find it interesting though I think it is enough now... only one more article about this and that's it!
Having fun developing stuff...
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