Hey you!

My name is Thomas Johannesmeyer. I'm a 27 year young indie developer and IT student from Paderborn, Germany. My friends also recognize me as hobby chef, guitar player, professional coffee lover, mechanical keyboard aficionado, admirer of great humor, good beer, wine and Scotch Whisky. My plans with this website do involve many of these hobbies. Let's see how it will develop. Here are a few words about myself and the 'computer part' of my life:

Computer science has been a long, intriguing and fascinating journey for me. It all started when I was 4 years old and my dad brought home a brand new Macintosh laptop. As you might have guessed, I had the privilege of growing up in a technophile and loving family. I had always been surrounded by state of the art hardware and, most importantly, people who knew how to use it. My dad taught me a lot about the principles of computer operation while my uncle introduced me to the basics of programming. I wrote my first (very basic) program when I was 8 years old. I feel very lucky that my family was very supportive in all those years. Raising an introvert growing up spending his childhood infront of a flickering screen rather than playing football with other kids, demands a lot of time and dedication. At least if you don't want to raise an antisocial smartass.

The fascination of commanding a machine to execute your orders never ceased. Au contraire, it kept growing and still gives me the chills from time to time. "Why?", you ask? Well, let this sink in a bit: You are not only able to solve a problem for yourself, but also for tens of thousands of people world wide. You can work on this problem ANYWHERE. From within a living room, on a train and from your local supplier of freshly brewed coffee. Heck!, chances are pretty high that one of your favourite triple A programs contains lines of code somebody wrote in a... let's say 'very silent' place. 😉
Solved once this solution can be copied without additional human labor and is available everywhere. It's glorious times that we are living in today. Everybody is connected and I realise this a bit more everyday: I receive mails from people working on broadway musicals, pilots, CEOs and, most touchingly, handicapped people. The most moving mail I've received so far came from a blind man. He told me one of my applications literally changed his life and that he uses it every single day. Why I'm telling this to you? BECAUSE THIS IS SOMETHING WORTH LIVING FOR! You can change the world for somebody. This really does motivate me (and hopefully you) a lot.

When I was done with the Gymnasium (the German equivalent of highschool), I decided I wanted to pursue a career in computer based technology. I started studying 'Industrial IT' which is a very hardware focused part of computer science. You see some bits jumping on an oscilloscope, solder circuits and shift bits. If you are not a computerphile type of person let me put this in perspective for you: If computer scientists were architects, constructing buildings and laying out rooms, this would be the work of an engineer who calculates the composition of compounds used for this building. You would also be in charge of the structural engineering calculations. While these tasks are highly demanding and the core of every machine, I strongly felt that I wanted to do something were I could influence people's lives directly. I wanted to talk to people and solve their problems. I also did miss the social aspect in my work with embedded systems a lot. If you do work in a tech-oriented industry, chances are fairly high that you can't talk about your job to anybody but your colleagues. Even if persons are interested, they simply won't understand. It is hard to realise that even if your best friends / family / girlfriend do sincerely care for what you do, nobody is interested in long term explanations and you will most probably swallow most of your thoughts at the end of a work day. So I worked on embedded systems for ~2 years and then searched for an opportunity to change from plain C / Assembler and sparkling logic boards into something that I would actually love and care about. That's when iOS and Mac OS X Development became interesting to me. I changed my major and University, moved to a new town and started all over. I finally had the opportunity to express creativity and passion within my code and I feel my journey finally reached the point where I want to stay a while...

Due to the success of one of my applications called Condense, I was able to quit my part-time job as a programmer in 2014 and work on my own projects as an independent programmer.

Thanks for not only taking the time to read through this section, but also for showing interest in my story and background. I hope I could motivate you to pursue your dreams... It is worth it!

So long and thanks for the fish!
-Thomas