Stephan, Student from Münster

Stephan heard about the Berlin Web Week 2014 and found LinuxTag the most interesting event in it, he says. When he visited the LinuxTag website he saw the opportunity for applying for a LinuxTag Scholarship -- and went for it. As for the result: Stephan became one of four LinuxTag scholarship holders 2014 given a three-day 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 started out with PHP, Java, Python and a bit of C. After he felt he had gained a deep understanding of programming, he started to learn about servers, he explains. He switched from Windows to Ubuntu and rented his first virtual server with Debian to get a better understanding how everything works (and 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."

On 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 in 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 accepts a search string for a YouTube video, extracts the Video-URL and adds it to the VLC Playlist. In the 3rd semester of his studies, Stephan started to freelance for some extra money. At first, he built websites. When he became more experienced with servers, he began offering server management and website maintenance for some projects. "Right now", he says, "I'm helping some friends with their startup for some extra experience along side 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 can applications be automatically deployed? How can you scale them? How can you do it with stateless and stateful apps?, he describes the questions that were most important to him.

At LinuxTag, he wishes to attend talks about configuration management and OpenStack as a platform for Infrastructure 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!