Hi my name is Chris,

I am German and I am 30 by now as well as ten years in the game of IT -Freelancing. I started as designer, and I really still like to think of me as one, although 90% of my work nowadays is coding of websites and software, and most of my customers book me as a senior software engineer. What makes me different is that I made my hobby my job,  I really love what I am doing, and if you believe the things my wife and friends say about me I am a true workaholic. But honestly,… who wouldn´t be if one can spend all his time with his hobby, and best of all earn money with it.

Basically I am specialized at developing with php, html, css and javascript. Though I tend not to reinvent the wheel over and over again, to save me and my customers some time, I use different frameworks to get the job done. That’s why I have worked a lot with Typo3 CMS, use  ZendFramework (witch is to my mind the new PEAR), and Symfony as well as CodeIgniter crossed my way once or twice. When it comes to Javascript I started with Prototype and Script.aculo.us a while a go, but then fell in love with jQuery and mootools. Although I had a protype project lately.

One of my friends once said our biggest advantage is that we are really lazy when it comes to coding.
I love OOP , I tend to rather think a minute longer about the lines I write while Coding to prevent retyping the same stuff over and over again.
I really dislike code where I have to change some 20+ lines a cross an unknown amount of files, just to change a simple behavior, or rendering, when a minute more brain power of the developer would have lead to a method in a nice class that would have gotten the job done nicely, and saved everyone else a lot of time.

When it comes to MVC I am more like the strict guy. Yes we have a model, be sure there is a nice controller, but hell no (!!!) there will never be any Html, CSS or Javascript inside the php / or some other server side code, nor will there be any php or sever side stuff in one of those 3. Why ? Simple,.. I don´t want the code only to be usable with Html websites, there is more stuff out there. But I have to admit,.. I have done it often my self, if it was customers wish, or the project required it, but no I don’t like it .

Last thing I´d like to share is that I am all ways curious about new stuff to learn.
No matter if it is about design or development. So at the moment I take a closer look at java and c, and because I really love my iphone objective – c. I really try to improve my ActionScript 3 skills, and pull the dust of my AS 2 skills, I guess like every designer I have a little addiction to flash. Since project management and technical lead do hit me from time to time nowadays I started learning about scrum and will be taking the exam for scrum master soon, as well as the php 5.3 certification of zend. I hope that I will manage to do the scrum product owner exam by march next year, after my vacation to OZ, where I will be travelling around from Dec. 27th 2009 until Feb. 1st 2010. I really love that country.

Now the most important lines,… I am freelancer, so feel free to hire me,… if you like to have me in your office that would be no problem, if it is outside the European union and does require a work visa, … help me to get one and I will be there. I love to travel, and to get to know new people and teams, learn new things, and ways of thinking. So country does not matter, my English is fluent, as a German this is my mother tongue, everything else can be solved by negotiation. If you like to teach me your language, I would love to learn every thing I can.