Projects
My Projects
GTFD – Getting Things Fucking Done
One of the workshops I visited during my time at IEEE Student Branch Passau was one held by Jens Oberender about the getting-things-done-concept. In consequence I tried a few tools to put this concept into practice, because I really liked it and it helped me organize my chaos of many heterogeneous tasks and responsibilities and not forget them. However, the existing tools like Tracks (Too ajaxy, too Ruby ;-) ) and Thinking Rock (too complicated, too heavy, too Java, too not mobile) did not meet my requirements. I then opted for Google Tasks in GMail for the time being although it was almost too simplistic and lacked a statistics feature.
In Summer 2011 I started to develop my own system to take my mind off the theoretical chapters of my bachelor thesis and to organize the tasks associated with the thesis and thus test the system.
The system is focused on simple, intuitive usage and a certain pinch of fun due to tounge-in-cheek messages. It is built upon Flsk, SQLAlchemy and Velruse and is available off github.
Gedankenacker
The name “Gedankenacker” (Thought’s acre) is a German play on words. It references “Gottesacker” (god’s acre), but as opposed to death and ending connected to the latter, “Gedankenacker” coveys the idea of something new, something to grow from ideas.
Initially I had planned it as a blog about music, philosophy and my opinion on these matters. However, the blogging boom of that time confused me and with little time at hand I canceled the project before it was even made launched.
When I closed my own PHP-Fusion theme site in favor of the official central one I wanted to have a new site to put my portfolio on and this was when I started with what you can see now. I thought Gedankenacker would be the perfect name.
Inseln der Winde
Over a period of three years I took an effort to create a free to play server for Ultima Online together with a team of writers, designers and role playing enthusiasts. The world should be of distinctive density and use a individual set of features to let the player dive into the experience. Unfortunately we had a hard time keeping up our motivation, especially in the last few months of our project when it became obvious that much of the Ultima Online community had vanished due to the strong, more modern alternatives like Word of Warcraft and Guildwars. Although we had made some nice progress the project was laid to rest eventually.
I still learned a lot during that time as the project introduced me to PHP-Fusion which would become my next pet issue. Additionally, it also brought me to Python and C++ and nurtured my love for programming. Overall I contributed a few thousand lines of PHP and Python Code, square-meters of graphics, thousands of forum posts, dozens of Texts and weeks spent on the design of the world. So in conclusion the project was a personal success for me for all the things I learned although the project itself failed.
Matonor – PHP-Fusion Themes
The theme I created for the Inseln der Winde (see above) website attracted great attention in the PHP-Fusion community, motivating me to found a website for advanced themes as the prepackaged themes at that time were of very simple, possibly outdated, nature. In 2004 no third party theme sites existed.
When the demand for my themes increased rapidly and more people came to visit I decided to publish all contents in two languages and eventually only in English, because the majority of my users was not German.
With growing popularity of my page, my themes and PHP-Fusion in general more and more visitors asked me to create custom-made themes for their sites. I was glad to do that, for free at first and later for a small fee to keep the demand manageable.