Can you give me a brief history of your programming days?

Ans. Although it’s a bit embarrassing, my first programming experience was trying to build a customized and skinnable mediaplayer with Visual Basic 6. This probably was around 1999 or so, and although the media player was quite nice in terms of features, it had countless timers and totally killed every CPU by just playing a simple song.

After this experiment I soon realized that I wanted to do something with the internet. One of my hobbies was (and still is) japanese anime and manga, and there wasn’t really a great community around it in germany at that time, so I took the challenge and created a community called Anime-Domain as my first big web project. It was my little playground, and after 10 revisions and designs it grew so popular that it was featured in german print magazines and had some 10k unique visitors a day. This was the time where I knew that by doing web development, you could reach many people very quickly with what you do, so I decided to continue to go that route.