The Guy Behind the Keyboard

I’m a thirty year old IT consultant and part-time otaku living in the south-west border region of Germany and working in Switzerland to which I commute as a daily routine. Living this close to the borders of France and Switzerland is a great opportunity to broaden your mindset and make friends from different countries. Also travelling with my parents when I was still a kid has certainly played its part in me being very interested in different cultures and my love to explore foreign countries. Two years ago, my high-school sweetheart made me the happiest man by becoming my loving wife. One of our wedding pledges is to visit each of the globe’s continents at least once. To date we are doing well but still have many go-to-places left. In addition to having traveled to ten different European countries together, we have so far been visiting Tokyo for three weeks (First picture: Asakusa), backpacking Cuba by Viazul buses for our honeymoon (Second picture: Trinidad) and cruising the Northern East coast of the United States by car (Third picture: New York).

My Areas of Interest and Expertise

On a professional level I specialize in Business Application Consulting which mainly (but not exclusively) involves SAP products. Like many in my field of work, I’m neither the typical programmer nor a user. Rather I work as an interface between those two parties and try to function as an intermediary. This requires basic programming skills (despite not being a professional developer), knowledge about the user’s daily work (so basically being able to do their job but without knowing all the details and finesse one acquires when actually doing it), soft skills to communicate with both sides at eye-level as well as a firm grasp of project and process management methodologies to help identify improvement potential and assist in getting it translated into an actual software solution. If you’re working in the same industry, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn or Xing to share experience.

When I’m not heads-deep in business software, chances are you might either find me studying Japanese or immersed into video games. I cannot really tell what got me started with studying Japanese. It was but a moment in my bachelor’s flat when my university studies were coming to an end. I think I was looking for another challenge and since Japanese culture had already fascinated me for quite some time (at the time I was actively playing Go), it was a natural action rather than a conscious decision to enroll for an evening Japanese class. Boy, did I get the challenge I asked for! Seven years have passed since and I am still not able to communicate in Japanese and understand only half the characters that a Japanese high-school graduate will have learned during school life. My ability is enough to order coffee or ask for directions, though. I might even read easy-to-understand Manga or e-mails when having ready access to an electronic dictionary. It’s these little accomplishments that prevent me from giving up on the task.
Ok, I lied about that. In fact, I have given up on Japanese two times already, but I always kept coming back to my vocab memorization app (Check out Anki if you need a great spaced-repetition tool).   

The video gaming part is easier to keep up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not gaming every day, but from time to time it can be great thing to hop into another world and “save the princess”. It helps relax from work and Japanese which when overdone can really fry your brain. For this I own an Xbox One and a Nintendo Switch. I’m not a computer gamer because I don’t want to check system requirements and go through installation processes nor spend my spare time “modding my gaming machine” but rather plug and play. In case you wonder why I chose the Xbox One over the PS4, that’s because Sony did not manage to release a decent controller in four generations of gaming consoles.   

 

What Am I Doing Here?

In the past couple of years, I often thought about starting a blog and I even did, but I never found the time to create enough content to fill my own web space. For me, Steemit is a great opportunity to join a community that is lively even without me contributing but at the same time appreciates the times when I have some spare time to create an article and publish it. As you might have noticed I signed up here quite some time ago already but as I learned from my previous blogging attempts creating high-quality content can be extremely time consuming and as I did not want to spam with half-hearted posts written between two evening beers it took some time for me to get active. Following the quality over quantity principle I will continue to publish articles on a very irregular basis but will make sure that they do contain valuable content.
As to what that content will be is going to depend on my mood as well as on what topics are trending either in the community or in my personal life at that moment. It is very probable that they will have something to do with either blockchain technology or the topics mentioned above. But from time to time I may also take a stray and write, let’s say, about the latest HBO series or a book that I’ve found interesting.