Who am I?
My name is Dominik Honnef
, I was born in and currently live in
Germany
.
In 2010, I received my Abitur (kind of the German equivalent to the A-levels) and started studying Applied Computer Science at the university of Duisburg. As of spring 2013, I am still studying at that university.
My personal interests can be best described with three words: Linux, Ruby and Open source.
What is my history?
I started using Linux back in 2006, using Ubuntu 6.10. I have since gathered a deeper understanding of (GNU/)Linux and its ecosystem, moving from Ubuntu to Debian, Arch Linux and Gentoo.
Linux was, for me, also the door to the world of open source, which I was not that familiar with while I was still using Microsoft Windows.
About a year later, in 2007, a friend convinced me to give Ruby a try. Back then I was a PHP programmer who belonged to the "Why would I need any other language?" faction (which, looking back at it, was one of my most stupid opinions). Obviously, my friend had a hard time convincing me and it took several months until I actually peeked into the language.
Eventually, my friend and I started working on a Ruby project together, RubyIRCd, which finally introduced me to the true beauty of Ruby. Since then I have written various libraries and programs as well as web applications in Ruby and I am not looking back to PHP at all.
In late 2012, however, I started learning Go. It was by no means my first experience with statically typed and compiled languages because I have been writing C on and off before. But C was never a candidate to replace Ruby for me. Go, on the other hand, was.
I had long been looking for an alternative to Ruby, for many reasons. For one I became increasingly frustrated by the Ruby community and its various "heroes" and drama revolving around them. Go, being still relatively new and unpopular has the benefit of a small community. While some might say this is a disadvantage, I disagree. It keeps drama and politics at bay and the existing community concentrates on the language itself.
Secondly, Ruby as a language had several shortcomings for some of my project ideas, where speed, memory consumption and also dependency management and ease of deployment were important factors.
Long story short, as of this writing, I invest most of my energy in Go instead of Ruby.
What do I do?
My main interest in programming is designing and developing libraries and frameworks for other people to use. While I do occassionally build whole applications, I definitely prefer writing libraries.
During my life I also participated in various other projects. For three and a half years, I was part of the voluntary support staff at funpic.de, one of the biggest German free webhosters offering PHP and MySQL.
I have been working for freiesMagazin for over two and a half years. freiesMagazin is a free online publication covering Linux, open source in general, programming and various other topics. Initially, my work consisted of typesetting articles (using LaTeX) but soon I became part of the editorial staff, communicating with authors, typesetters and co, managing issues of the magazine.
