Alex, student from Münster

So, who is Alex? Student of computer science at University of Münster, 25 years old, 11th semester, shortly before taking off into job life. His special field of interest is distributed systems, the topic he has chosen for seminars and his Bachelor thesis. "It is quite fascinating what you achieve with parallel and distributed systems - for example with OpenCL - compared to classical sequential systems", he says. Beside his studies, Alex earns some money as a working student, for example as an exercise instructor. But, as he describes, after two years of debugging other people's code he got bored with it. He changed jobs and came in contact with web development. He discovered: "Until then, I never took this field of programming very seriously. Now as I am working with it, I discover a broad and interesting market. This counts for today, and even more for the future."

Alex came to Open Source and Linux when he met his first Linux distribution around 2002, when he was thirteen and a friend pointed him to Suse Linux. He recalls: "We didn't have internet at this time, so he gave me some installation discs he got from a computer magazine. I really kind of liked it. It was different and I liked to experience something new. But I didn't have my own computer. So it was a short term experience, because my family wasn't familiar with this new system and not open for a change." One year later, when the family got an Internet connection, he discovered IRC. He wished to have an IRC-bot running all the time and doing some small tasks. So he decided to rent a Linux shell for seven bucks a month, limited to two processes. Today he says: "It was the discovery of my life. It was not just the first time I met the other side of Linux, the 'dark one' , the terminal/ssh one. It was also the point where I started real coding." Shortly thereafter, he started to help manage real servers. This is what he learned from this experience: "I started to learn the real power of Linux by the terminal. I loved it. I still do, even so I use it with a desktop environment. Some tasks are just faster done from the terminal."

Today, he says, it's not just a hobby anymore, but what he wants to do as a career. When he started studying, he installed Ubuntu on the notebook, because he found it less limited than Windows: He loved the idea of more than one workspace especially for coding, and the tools that were available, as he explains. Speaking of coding: Alex adds an extensive, special note about why he is so fascinated by it.

"You can do a lot out of nothing", he puts it. "You can just write ideas down and bring them to life, without money or other stuff that would be difficult or expensive to get. I like it to have the power to make your own and other people's life easier, by nothing but the power of an idea - and your fingers of course! I think without open source, this would not be that easy. I even guess the whole Internet would be different today, if there wasn't open source software. It's not just luck that Linux is that widely spread in the server world. It's because it's easy to get, you can use it without paying for it, it's just available for everyone. Without it, I guess, the Internet would be more expensive on the provider side. And that would limit spreading content. The same applies to software. Without the open source world it would be impossible to create software for free. A lot of ideas would have failed, just by lack of money."

At LinuxTag, he wishes to improve his coding experience by new ways of how things can easily be deployed from a staging to a live system, and how to setup a server perfectly by using virtual machines, or by outsourcing data. He wishes to learn more about how to organize big projects with other people, manage tasks better or maybe even improve his own way of planning. He chose the 'Pimp the web' track as one of the most interesting: He spends a lot of time with web- and mobile software at the moment. As he says, the primary goal is not to ear a lot of money, but just because he likes it: "Putting days and weeks of coding something, then seeing the great result. It's a feeling that only creators can understand, I guess."

Alex, with your mobile development focus, we hope you profit especially from LinuxTag's partner event droidcon. Have a great time!