Stephan, Student aus Münster

Stephan heard about the Berlin Web Week 2014 and found LinuxTag the most interesting event, he says. When he visited the LinuxTag website he saw the LinuxTag Scholarship opportunity -- and went for it. As for the result - here we go: Stephan became one of four LinuxTag scholarship holders 2014 given a three days' Full Conference Ticket.

So, who is Stephan? Being a 25 years old student of Computer Science (11th semester) at University of Münster, his modules of choice are 'Distributed Systems' and 'Multicore and GPU'. "We programmed a cinema cashier system for a university course", he tells. "This and my own Linux server are my biggest projects so far."

He began to write code around 2004 when he was fifteen. Since his father is a programmer, he had early contact with computers. So he went off with PHP, Java, Python and a bit of C. After he felt to have gained a deep understanding of programming, he started to learn about servers, he explains: Changed from Windows to Ubuntu and rented his first virtual server with Debian to get a better understanding how everything works (as he underlines: "console only!") Stephan recalls: "This was my first real contact with open source software. Since then I started to use Apache, NGINX, PHP-FPM, uwsgi, MySQL, Postfix and so on."

With his own server, he started off with a normal LAMP stack. Later he developed an IRC bot in Java just for fun, because Java was in heavy use at his university courses. The bot featured commands for searching YouTube videos (through the API) and displaying the results in the channel. After this, he built another command for remote control of a VLC instance: The bot receives a search string for a YouTube video, extracts the Video-URL and adds it to the VLC Playlist. In his 3rd semester of studies, Stephan started to freelance for some extra money. At first, he built websites. When he became more experienced with servers, he offered server management and website maintenance for some projects. "Right now", he says, "I'm helping some friends with their startup for some extra experience beside my studies."

In 2013 he went ahead and tried to understand "the whole cloud thingy", as he calls it. He took a look at Amazon Web Services: How you can deploy automatically applications? How you can scale them? How can you do it with stateless and stateful apps?, he describes as his questions of matter.

At LinuxTag, he wishes to go for talks about configuration management and OpenStack as a platform for Infrastructur as a Service (IaaS). "I'm finishing my studies soon", he adds. "So I want to take a deeper look into the 'big things' of internet, to choose the right direction and the right company for my future work."

Stephan closed his application by saying: "It would be a pleasure to take part at LinuxTag and learn some really cool things." So, Stephan, we hope you do - welcome to LinuxTag 2014!