This year I will come as independent freelancer to EclipseCon2013. After 19 years working for the same company it is time for me to move on and get into new adventures. I had a really great time. In April 1994, I started as a freelancer working for a small startup company called
TakeFive from my home office in
Heidelberg (and I still work from my home office). TakeFive was located in
Salzburg about 500km from where I live. Working from a home office was tough back then. I had only an
Modem at 9600bits/sec (about 1kb/s) and calling to Austria was expensive at that time. So, I was regularly traveling with my sun workstation to Salzburg to synchronise my data. If I compare this with today it is hard to believe that I worked that way.
The name of the company changed but it was the same old TakeFive for me:
TakeFive then was acquired by
ISI in 1995. In 2000 ISI merged with WindRiver and 2009
WindRiver was acquired by Intel. Since 2009 I worked as employee at Wind River...
TakeFive was selling an IDE, called SNIFF+, originally created by Walter Bischofberger based on ET++, a very cool framework created by Erich Gamma and André Weinand. Around 2002/2003 we switched using eclipse as basis of our IDE... But it was in 1999 when I have seen the first versions of eclipse. In 2000 (before eclipse became open source) I started using it. I have been to all EclipseCons (and EclipseCons Europe) until 2010... But now it is time to meet all the nice eclipse folks again....
I am currently working on a start-up project that looks really promising but it is top secret and I can't talk much about it. Working for start-ups is a gamble. My gamble in 1994 worked for 19 years... Let's see if this one works out... I really enjoy working for a small start-up from my home office. It feels very much like TakeFive in the early days: it is challenging -- it also feels free -- free to win and free to fail, but that is the destiny of a freelancer ...
