The (tech) life of Markus Ressel

Since this is the first real post on my personal website, I thought I should tell you a little about myself. In this post, I talk about how I originally started programming, what events brought me to Android, and how that evolved later on.

Childhood

Ever since I can remember I have been interested in technologies of all kinds, although my first contact with computers was through - you guessed it - gaming. Having the opportunity to play games like The Secret of Monkey Island, Wings of Fury, Zak McKracken and Zool on the Amiga of my Grandpa was always a blast and I have lovely memories of that time.

Later in life and thanks to my father I had the privilege of owning my first Windows 95 PC, although I still mainly did game on it. My first encounters with programming were with the Robby RP5, a small tracked vehicle robot from Conrad Electronics, equipped with a variety of sensors. I studied the documentation together with my father (at that time still on real paper! 😝) and developed my first small programs in BASIC to control the movements and the behavior of the robot.

Lots of phones

When transitioning from elementary school to high school, I got the first phone of my own, the Sony Ericsson K700i and played around with a Palm Z22 before upgrading to the Vodafone VPA compact running Windows Mobile 2003 SE. In 2010 I finally made the jump to my first kind of smartphone: the Samsung S8500 Wave, which ran the Bada OS. This was the first mobile device I developed an application for in C++ using Samsungs own IDE for a school project and... I remember that it was a real pain in the a**. Although the device hardware itself was great, Bada itself never gained any real traction and with the "upgrade" to Bada 2.0 the phone got basically unusable. Thats why in 2011 I decided to switch to the Android ecosystem with the Galaxy Nexus, later upgrading to the LG G2, the LG G4 and the OnePlus 6T, which I am still using as of today.

Learning for life

Due to my interest in everything that had to do with computers, studying computer science was an obvious choice. During this time I got to know new friends as well as a variety of scientific topics and spent countless hours in the university workspaces.

In 2015, together with Max Rosin, I started developing my first "big" app: PowerSwitch. An Android app that I used to remotely control the wireless sockets in my home. What was initially intended as a proof of concept turned into something that was well received by others, leading to the buildup of a small community. PowerSwitch got more and more features and served me as a platform to try out different technologies in the mobile area. At the same time I was able to gain experience in working with a community, both in terms of issue and feature management as well as personal interactions on the dedicated forum and Google+ Community (RIP 🪦).

Towards the end of my studies I gained my first work experience as a software engineer at IVU Traffic Technologies AG, both as an Android and full-stack web developer. Even though the salary (as a working student) was rather meager, I really enjoyed being able to work on projects just like my colleague full-time developers. Thats where I experienced for the first time what it's like to develop software in a larger team of about 10 developers.

What I have learned

Even though I don't maintain PowerSwitch anymore, it was a milestone in my life. It showed me how much I love developing for and with the community. This is one of the reasons why I am a big advocate of FOSS and dream of a future where most software is freely available. While working on web projects was fun too, I am much more interested in creating mobile solutions that everyday people on the streets can benefit from. Thats why I am very happy to be working at Adesso Mobile Solutions for the forseeable future.

If you have made it this far, I hope it was an interesting read and at least some of your questions about me were answered. Maybe some day we will meet IRL and we can have a little chat about other stuff 😊