Programming is passion
I’m Bernhard Reiter, a passionate software developer since over 17 years by now, from Munich / Germany.
The beginning
Early contact with computers I had already destroying my fathers computers config.sys and autoexec.bat with around 10 years.
I was always more interest in how this works and how I can create own program, but gaming a bit with Monkey Island and Co was fun.
So with my fathers old Commodore C64 Basic Books I began to write my first “programs” – initially on a V-Tech child’s Laptop with a little Basic Interpretation, later in GW-Basic and QBasic.
Qbasic is boring…
In the times of Windows 95 all was GUI and the DOS Programs were not anymore “state of the art”. And soon I recognized, that QBasic was slow and limited. And so I started in the summer of ’99 programming C++. But MFC was difficult and development of small programs was slow and not that big fun.
This was the start for developing the first huge GUI Applications in Visual Basic – fortunately due to School-Licenses of Visual Studio I could get the full Development Suite cheap for my 14th birthday.
HOBBY TO JOB
It was clear – that I wanted to make my hobby, which took a lot of time and some schools holidays spending at the front of my computer, getting professional and earn money.
And here I started again to learn a new programming language – Microsoft Visual FoxPro. Starting my career as a professional developer at ProLib Software in Seebruck (next to the lake Chiemsee in Bavaria) with some of the best geeks in this area as my mentors and teachers.
Especially here I want to name Juergen Wondzinksi (wOOdy) and Christof Wollenhaupt (foxpert) who soon recognized that it was more than just a job for me – I did it with passion – through all the highs and lows and I got a lot mentoring and teaching – even when it was sometimes deep late night.
In these 4 years, getting my official job title “Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung” (Specialist for Application Development) I learned not only how to develop professional software and all the principles of Patterns and strategies, I learned as well deep insights about performant database design.
Soon I recognized, that I loved the challenging programming in the backend calculation engines of financial software – but it started as well my love for the web application development
Next Station – the Web 2.0
As an early adopter of Web 2.0 with AJAX, jQuery, MooTools, PHP4/PHP5 and ASP.NET, with already good knowledge using this techniques and tools in a financial web application for leasing business, I discovered that there is more to know – which was the start of getting deep into Linux, Windows Servers, Mail-Servers and so on.
I changed company and began to work for a young and small local advertising agency – there as a duo developer team, we created the agencies own CMS and managed the servers for the hosting of the customers websites.
Beside that, out of the offices hours, together with my friend Christoph Heuwieser, we started up our company crossVault (for which I now work as well) – doing specialized software and DevOps solutions for customers (well the term DevOps was not used so much at these times 🙂 ).
Node.JS, .NET Framework
After 2 years developing CMS systems and websites for customers I felt, that I wanted back to the financial/leasing sector where I was doing my first huge web application.
Fortunately I could reactivate my connections and so I started my new job in Munich as a software development manager – modernizing and creating the new versions of Leasing Point of Sales and Contract Management.
The team growth and we achieved success doing several projects for huge banks and companies in the European sector.
Mentoring and educating new team members in developing software with .NET Framework, we soon saw that it was time for doing JavaScript as well on the Backend – not only on the frontend.
We early adopted Node.js for our backend services, while the frontend was migrated from jQuery (UI) to Bootstrap and Backbone.js later to knockout.js as the 2-way binding of Templates and Controllers got the new hype.
Being always interested in the new evolutions for the web, I started my first projects in the frameworks of React or Angular.
Back to the roots…
A new job – but back to the roots – in March 2016 I started my new job – as well in the financial sector, but especially in maintaining and migrating a huge in-house Microsoft Visual FoxPro application. Together again with wOOdy we could modernize this application, make it reliable and stabilize it, to optimize the business – unfortunately then the company went out of business.
As our company crossVault had a lot of interesting projects I got back there and used my knowledge of Angular (2), Node.js and SQL Database tuning and tweaking helping several companies in the “Industry 4.0” with their applications.
Try something new
An interesting job offer from Capgemini made me curious and a great interview, I got ready for the next adventure.
As a technical expert, I helped my colleagues especially in Angular Development and we achieved a great success in building up a superb team and a great application for a huge customer in the automotive sector. It was really fun, and I enjoyed it to jumpstart and mentoring my highly motivated friend and colleague Ashwani Singh.
Giving workshops for Angular was fun as well and showed me again, that I should get again more motivated and active in educating and mentoring.
Beside that project, I had the opportunity to be in the lead part for planning, creating and deploying a so called “DevOps Factory” – giving me deep insights of Saltstack, Ansible, Terraform and Docker.
The Future
Starting with the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic – I started fully integrated again with the highly motivated team of crossVault.
Migrating and developing a new web application in the Industry 4.0 sector for vessel – calculations, concepting SaaS web applications, Consulting application development (Angular) and giving workshop for migrations from Client-Server Applications to Web Applications I found my current passion and position again.
And this is still my credo – “Programming is passion”
