
Co-founder at Directed Edge
Berlin Area, Germany

Co-founder at Directed Edge
Berlin Area, Germany
I began working with LAMP back in the days where the men were men and we ate Perl for breakfast. Installing Linux with 40 floppy disks puts hair on your teeth. One thing led to another, and before I knew it I was living with an E-Commerce system. What can I say? I was young and needed the money.
I flirted with quantum physics for a summer, and got my name in some magazine about physique review or something. But open source had my number, and whisked me off to Germany, the land of engineering, pedantry, and obcession with the letter 'K'. What's the 'K' in KDE stand for? Nothing. That's how much they like 'K'.
Hanging around with these 'K' folks, and their desktop environment, they could not resist the powers of my cajun-mojo, and before I knew it I was flying around the world to talk about peace, love and graph algorithms. I reckon the KDE bunch is one of the groups of hardest C++ wonks there is, and hanging with the crew I got pretty darn good at it too.
As if one three letter crew wasn't enough, in those days I also lived in the SAP LinuxLab, who paid me well, but the three hour acronym spelling bees, disguised as meetings were too much. Hindsight is 20/20 and I can now see the good times and the bad.
It was off to Berlin, to reunite with a love nearly forgotten: nerdy folk packed into loud, dirty music clubs. Native Instruments was on the corners of Software Blvd. and Techno Lane and my chops as a once professional musician had not wholly fallen into disrepair.
All good things must come to an end though, and after recently aquiring permanent residence from the German Bureau for Too Much Paperwork it seemed time to try a new tune: How To Make The Web Not Suck, by Directed Edge.
API Design, C++, C, Perl, Qt, Linux, Platform Independence, Metadata, Audio, Information Retrieval, Graph Algorithms, Cajun Cooking
(Computer Software industry)
May 2008 — Present (1 year 3 months)
Straight-up collaborative filtering is your grandmother’s recommendation system. Directed Edge was founded in 2008 to make recommendations more exciting by using the way that stuff is connected on the social web to help people discover to help people discover new music, movies and media on our partner sites.
We launched our first technology preview based on Wikipedia in August of 2008 and have a slew of tricks up our collective sleeves that we’ll be rolling out in the coming months to make use of the make the social web, well, useful.
(Non-Profit; 1001-5000 employees; Computer Software industry)
November 2001 — Present (7 years 9 months)
I was most active in the KDE project from 2001 to 2006 when I wrote the JuK media player and was the most active contributor (for many of the years) to KDE's multimedia software. I also was involved in working on KDE's educational software, some of the core library components. Over the years in KDE I have made thousands of commits, closed over 900 bugs, and was for a time one of the more active public speakers. At this point I still track some of the mailing lists and do updates to TagLib, which KDE uses for reading audio meta data.
(Privately Held; 51-200 employees; Computer Software industry)
July 2006 — June 2008 (2 years)
* Designed and implemented sound / preset database for Kore, NI's flagship product
* Maintained portions of Native Instrument's platform abstraction libraries
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; SAP; Computer Software industry)
August 2002 — June 2006 (3 years 11 months)
* Maintained Linux-specific portions of SAP's platform abstraction layer
* Did the initial port of the the SAP R/3 Kernel to 64-bit Linux
* Worked together with AMD to produce the first R/3 benchmarks for the AMD-64 architecture
* Presented SAP on Linux solutions at conferences in Europe and the Middle East
Search technology, information graphs, complex emergent systems, metadata, software usability
Hacker News: wheels
Publications:
* KDE-Applikationen von der Kommandozeile aus bedienen, Linux Magazin, January 2004
* KDE Scripting With DCOP, Linux Magazine, Issue 36, November 2003
* Origin of correlated electron emission in double ionization of atoms, Physical Review A 66, 061402, Issue 6 - December 2002, S. L. Haan, P. S. Wheeler, R. Panfili, and J. H. Eberly