About me

My first computer was a ZX81. Even back then, I wanted to know how computers work and what you can do with them. My career began with training as an industrial electronics technician (Energieelektroniker) – there was no suitable IT training to be had at the time. Soon after, my interest became my profession.

I’ve been an independent IT consultant in Vienna since 1993. A lot of my work starts where things get difficult: high-risk migrations, tight deadlines, neglected IT environments, or projects that have already failed.

I design and run networks with complex routing, redundant firewalls, and secure Wi-Fi. That includes fail-safe links between sites and system replication. For virtualization, I work with VMware, Proxmox, and Hyper-V, as well as cloud services and Docker. Database migrations are part of it too – sometimes out of systems that grew over the years until hardly anyone can follow how they’re put together.

Over time, information security became more and more of a focus. One focus in particular is my data protection work: the GDPR in combination with Austria’s laws governing psychologists, physicians, and hospitals.

I’ve been writing software since I started out. Since 2007, I’ve been building administrative applications for associations and social service organizations, including membership management, time tracking, scheduling, and libraries. For the medical field, I developed a diagnostics application that processed and delivered 2.9 million test results within three years of operation. The older applications are built on a PHP API with an Angular or Vue front end. These days, my stack is mostly FastAPI or Django with Vue 3, plus Frappe with Vue 3, all in TypeScript; I only touch JavaScript with red-hot migration tongs. As for PHP: PHP is the perfect language to migrate away from.

I’ve also been passing on what I know in seminars since 1994. I’m often brought in for topics where it’s hard to find anyone else to teach them.

As managing director, I run Steidl IT GmbH. My most important product, Setup Foundry, is now developed and sold by Steidl IT GmbH.