About

First of all, this is a private blog. Anything you read here is my very own oppinion and experience in different areas of technology.

Who's writing here?

My name is Thomas Schwärzl (to:mas ʃvɛɐ̯tsl) born in Germany and currently living near Karlsruhe. I do triathlon, play with my kids and love to fiddle around with everything powered by electrical energy. I started with computers with the age of 12 and created my first homepage with Word3.11. Yes, really, I know, yes, I used Word for that. 🙈 I soon figured out that it isn't the best tool to use and learned HTML, then PHP with MySQL and built my very first dynamic website.

Back in the days of real local multiplayer gaming I developed two online league systems which were used in big LAN partys. I started to host them online for Medal of Honor and Operation Flashpoint and created multiple esport news sites like the Onlinewars Network (OWN) and Esportsnet (ESN) which lead to over half a million unique visits a month. While always being a one-man-show I was used to develop the backend, frontend and maintain all web- and database-servers. I loved it, as I had to learn simply everything in detail. Especially learning the hard way how to scale your infrastructure without any cloud technology was a lesson for life. Thanks to the incredible wonderful community (I love and miss you!) there were enough contributers which added news and rumors about the latest gaming news. So I didn't have to worry about most of the content and forum moderation on my sites.

Skills developed over time. Python and Django came along, then Android and iOS development. I developed some apps and some websites, nothing special.

While being more of a software developer in my free time my main job was on the other side: 100% operations. Not only near, but in the datacenter I got my way from 1st to 3rd level support. The last big datacenter job I did was designing two new datacenters on the green field and then migrate literally everything from the old datacenter to the new ones without downtime. Even Microsoft came along and created together with abtis a success story about the project.

Cloud got big in the world, except from Germany. The germans were sleeping and maintaining legacy systems. I thought it's time to move on and got myself into the cloud world myself. It took a while, but as the cloud is just someone else computer it was fast to learn. #troll

Well, here I am, again, designing and engineering everything end to end. From source code to operations, sprinkled with security.