International blogging

Hi,
so this is my first entry. Joining the Foxite community is hopefully a lot of fun and even more opportunity to learn more about Visual FoxPro and software engineering. So, maybe I should start with a short introduction to myself.

My name is Jochen Kirstätter - aka JoKi - and I'm living near Kaiserslautern, Germany, Europe, Earth. I started developing software back in 1995. At that time I programmed dynamic web sites using HTML (UI), Perl and later PHP (business logic) and MySQL (database) - a natural three-tier environment. During spring 1999 I joined Kheops GmbH, a small company in Kaiserslautern and got in contact with Visual FoxPro 6 SP 5. Wow, amazing! And at that moment I did a lot of mistakes but during my first attendance at 1999s Devcon Germany I got the final idea and returned to multi-tier development. Puuh, VFP provides so much possibilities and I got lost in spaghetti code. But right after this conference I was delighted and got a way back to tier development. Thanks for that.

In 2002 I got the chance to speak about Active FoxPro Pages (vendor session) at the German Devcon. OMG, I was so nervous and... it was a bad experience after all. But hey, it was also a chance to improve my capabilities as speaker and one year later it was really fun. In 2003 I did the sessions for Whil Hentzen (he got ill...) about VFP/Linux and I guess it was okay. So, still a year later, I had four sessions - two as regional director of the German FoxPro User Group and two about Active FoxPro Pages - and yup, finally I got the idea.
I'm currently working on the sessions for this years conference later in November. At the moment I'm preparing three to four sessions. All about different aspects in VFP and development in general. Cross fingers... ;-)

Meanwhile I'm regional directory of the German FoxPro User Group in Speyer - the city with the dome...
We meet monthly and have a really good time talking about VFP, SQL Server and sometimes about .NET framework. During 2003 Microsoft Germany contacted me to join their community program named CLIP. That was because of my FAQ website abou Active FoxPro Pages and VFP in general. And so the whole community related stuff exploded to the maximum and it's really a lot of fun. At the end of 2004 I was contacted by the European INETA communty - thanks to Rainer Becker who registered all dFPUG usergroups. And since this year I'm as well active in SQL PASS community to chat about Microsoft SQL Server - so, any technology I use at my daily work at Kheops is compained by a community activity - maybe I'm addicted to this whole stuff... ;-) really dunno, but I have a lot of fun doing this.

Additional to my daily job at Kheops and ProLib I develop small tools and other stuff - hopefully useful to anyone else than me. There are several - HTML Plugin for Active FoxPro Pages, VFP and COM interface, AfpWiki and Active FoxPro Pages FAQ. I hope to write some lines about those during next months... so, wait and see.

Okidoki, so this is my international hello to the VFP community.

Have fun, JoKi