Niklaus Hirt
Geneva
Nik had a first contact with computers in the early 80′s when he got his Commodore VIC-20 at age of 12.
Tired of playing Lunar Lander he started programming small BASIC applications.
Later going through Commodores C 64 and Amiga 500 he got familiar with Assembler (sic!) programming.
In the early 90′h he finally got his first PC (an i486DX2-66 with 2GB of RAM!) and started programming in Pascal and in 1995 jumped on the Java V1.0 bandwagon.
Attending the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology (EPFL – 18th in the 2008 Shanghai-Ranking – second best in Europe) to graduate in Computer Science in the year 1998.
Working as an Analyst/Programmer for ELCA in Lausanne for 4 years he acquired solid development skills in J2EE.
Changing to CAST software in 2000 marked a turn in specialization as he started working as a pre- and postsales consultant/specialist in the field of Software Quality.
After 10 years of pre- and post-sales work he joined the IBM Software Group as a Tech Sales specialist for the Rational brand.
In his free time Nik is mainly occupied by his family and if there is some spare time he tries hard to be a geek, writes blog entries, composes music and posts more or less interesting comments on twitter.