Mark on PhotoSubClosure is a blog about my endeavours into the weird and wonderful world of web technology. I’m a freelance software and web developer based in Auckland, New Zealand.

At the moment I’m working mainly with Flex/Flash, PHP, Joomla and Javascript. But I also have a good background in Java development.
I graduated with a masters degree in Computer Science and Philosophy at the Humbolt University in Berlin, Germany.

My first programming experiences reach back to the good old 8 bit homecomputer days. The very first computer was a Laser 210.
I learned to program BASIC on it and developed some small video games at the age of 12. After that I moved on to a Commodore C64 and then my all time favorite computer the Commodore Amiga 500. This was just a splendid machine.amigadisk

In 1993 I upgraded to a PC 486DX/33. When I saw the game Ultima Underworld running on it in a computer store, I just couldn’t resist anymore – I had to have this machine. I went through a lot of PC’s and notebooks through the years.
At some stage in 1997 I had enough of reinstalling windows 95 and installed LINUX Slackware on my machine. Since then I pretty much constantly used LINUX (later Debian and Ubuntu Distributions) until I got myself a MacBook Pro with Mac OS X which is BSD based.
All my servers run on Debian. At around the same time when I switched to LINUX, I also got myself a job as a LINUX and UNIX System Administrator at the Humbolt University. This was a great job and I learned heaps about apache, php, shell scripting, AWK and other LINUX tools.
After that I went on and started my software developer career at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin as a Java Developer. That was still the time of java 1.4. This was also a great job – I developed e-learning applications.

In 2005 I left Germany and traveled for one year to Australia and then New Zealand. Because I love the outdoors, hiking, kayaking, etc I started to look for a permanent job and found one in Auckland as a Webdeveloper.
Since then I’ve been specializing in Flex, PHP, etc.
In 2009 I decided to work as a freelancer which has been great so far.

I can also be found on linkedin.

Cheers
Mark