(A heavily annotated resume)
Born and raised in Oldenburg (i.O.), Germany.
Parents: Wilfried Freericks (at the time, art student; but he changed to architecture to learn something that might get the baby fed) and Iris Freericks (at the time, working for an insurance company; she started working as a school assistant when I was 7, studied when I was 10, and became a teacher for German and History in Berlin when I was 16). My father comes from a family of sailors, smiths, and shipyard workers, most all situated in or around Papenburg (that's a small town in the midst of north-western Germany (Ostfriesland), mostly living from the sea. Today, the biggest economic player is Meyer's shipyard, which specialized in giant luxury cruisers, and got in-famous for having built the Estonia, the ferry that sank in the Baltic. My father even sometimes works for them, doing interior design in an opulent style neither he nor I like - he raised me on design norms based on the Bauhaus and modern Italian styles). My mother's father came from Holland, but neither I nor she knew him (there is a story behind that); I don't know much about my maternal grandmother, except that she was a second-generation 7th's-day-Adventist, and lived in constant conflict with her un-believing daughter. I can lay claim to being baptized twice, since my mom had to undergo the whole procedure to become a good catholic, so as to be able to marry my dad. My tendency to preach comes from my father (I have heard that in his youth, he seriously considered becoming a priest -- nothing extraordinary: in Papenburg, 6-9 children where normal, and just about every family had one son become priest, or a daughter nun).
Grundschule Staakenweg, Oldenburg.
Mostly harmless, if not boring.
Orientierungsstufe Eversten, Oldenburg.
I don't want to think about the time. Between 11 and 15, life wasn't much fun. At age 16, things got brighter. If it wouldn't sound so pretentious, I would say "linguistics changed my life" (Udo "S" Tolle, Caspar David Friedrich, and the TransAtlantik did help, too).
Gymnasium Eversten, Oldenburg.
The first three years were rather horrid, too. Then came the eleventh class, and the system of somewhat-arbitrarily chosen courses. In Germany, there are four subjects that are to be studied "in depth" during the last three years of school, and that are weighted at 33% in the final graduation exams. In a decision that surprised just about everybody, i choose German, Math, Art and History as the primary subjects (everyone had expected math, but art and german?). Curiously enough, in the last three years of school, my ratings went down in Math and up in Art and German. (History was and is a problem; I like the subject, but my deficient memory for names and dates makes exams a horror.)
First exposure to computerdom on a TR-440 at our university, on some CP/M Basic computers, and on a HP graphics machine (HP Basic, monochrome graphic screen, builtin thermal dot-matrix printer for screen-shots and listing, and a plotter). First real (as in, larger programs, and read the documentation) programming experiences with a TI-59. Second real programming experience (Basic, assembly) with a CBM 3032. First own "real" computer (a C-64). Work for a small software company, writing "educational" software on an Apple-II for the Goethe-Institut.
In retrospective, my software writing style at the time was rather horrid, and the program was a mess. Having to use Apple Basic didn't help.
Abitur at the Gymnasium Eversten, Oldenburg.
I finished the Abitur with a rating of 1.9 (a fact that I was very proud about - and still am, as you can see by it being listed here). When I looked at the combined results, I knew that I had to study either art or computer science. I toyed with the idea of doing industrial design, but decided against it - I am a good enough art critic to know that my drawing skills aren't very good, and I knew that manual skills are important in practice. So I chose CS, and Berlin as the place to study - not the least for its being beyond the clutches of the Bundeswehr (before the unification, those males living in Berlin were exempt from the draft. Having thought of this, my mother made me an official Berlin citizen before I turned 16, so I never turned up in the lists of the Kreiswehrersatzamt.)
Matriculation at the TU Berlin, dept. of computer science (then FB 20, Informatik)
The first two years were so boring I took on a job:
Free-lance programming for a small Berlin software company (GCG Soft & Hardware).
Pay was on a percent basis and not nearly enough, especially when a program flopped with only a dozen copies sold. Still, I learned something about user interface design & the importance of handbook writing, "soft" real-time programming on a desperately under-powered machine (the C-64 was _the_ musician's machine at the time, and assembly was its language!), and MIDI synthesizers with broken documentation (the user is angry at you if your program fails to work because it behaves according to spec, but the machine it is supposed to control doesn't! This can be a shock to the naiveté of a student reared on formal methods). Also, I experienced the exhilarating feeling when a program of yours gets a positive two-page review in a consumer journal.
In the last year at GCG, I "managed" a group of free-lance programmers working on a composer program.
The project died due to a lot of reasons (technical, conceptual, social, financial), and my respect for the Art of Software Engineering went up a notch - and down again when I first encountered SE teaching at the university. Still, it made me read the Brooks' book. I swore to myself to never again undertake a programming project with so many unknown factors and loose design parameters.
Intermediate diploma (Vordiplom)
Back then, CS study at the TU Berlin underwent a major change of character after the Vordiplom. In the first four semesters, everything was well-regulated, and only small choices did exist. After the Vordiplom, there was a near-total freedom of what to study, and many students had no idea what to do next, and in what field to specialize. Those people that worked in the context of a project had at least so much guidance. I attached myself to the CAMP project (Computer-Aided Music Design - don't laugh!), where I could continue my work on real-time software and write an interesting Studienarbeit (embedding a Scheme interpreter in a real-time environment). It was fun, and even interdisciplinary (there were students from the departments Kommunikationswissenschaften, Musikwissenschaften, Elektrotechnik, and Informatik). We even went to the Hanover fair (ehh, CeBit) with it, and to the ICMC (Int'l Computer Music Conference). CAMP even gave me opportunity to co-author two papers that got published years later via some very circuitous paths.
Diploma, Thesis on "Entwurf und Spezifikation einer funktionalen Programmiersprache fuer die speziellen Erfordernisse der digitalen Signalverarbeitung"
The organizer of the CAMP group, Rupert C. Nieberle, knew an assistant at the group for robotics and realtime data processing (PDV)r. That assistant, now Prof. Dr. Alois Knoll of Uni Bielefeld, asked me whether I was interested in defining an applicative real-time programming language for a diploma thesis. Was I interested! Amongst my earliest dreams when encountering computers was defining my very own programming language, and there I was asked to do this for a thesis!
And so I started out defining something along the lines of Scheme, with a "suspension" concept to provide real-time in the fashion of generalized futures. Then Alois asked for overloading, and I said "no problem, its just a typecheck". And of course scheme-syntax was too hard, so it was infix-ed. And of course dereferencing of suspensions should be automatical. And obviously dereferencing of suspensions that are not available should block the expression. And so on. At the end, the language looked fine in theory, but was a mess in practice. (Not that there was a practice, the first simulator was finished months later, and horribly slow.) I had tried to write a formal semantics, but it got too complicated, and it didn't get into the thesis.
Working on an ALDiSP interpreter (parser in C, interpreter in Scheme).
Utter horror. ALDiSP was _complex_, and I tried to write an interpreter that worked on the "direct" syntax tree, i.e. without any simplifications.
Also trying to find grants.
Stayed at Munich, where I worked as a "Werkstudent" at Siemens, preparing the CBC project (mainly interface definitions and such).
A rather interesting time. I worked there for two reasons: the first being the need to create a technical background for the project that was then in a planning stage, and later named CBC; the second being that I applied for a Ernst-von-Siemens grant, such grants only being given to students who have had some previous contact with the company. So, in a strange double-think maneuver, my Siemens 'sponsor' and I decided that I should do a 2-month internship _after_ the grant was (informally) granted, but _before_ it (formally) started.
These are most likely the two most productive months of my whole life. Forced to lead a 9-to-5 life, without access to news.groups, games, or even an Emacs, I worked myself through specifications of diverse hardware layout formalisms (esp. the EDIF variant at use there), designed software to test my understanding of said formalisms, designed three new formalisms to be used within the project (proto-nML, a net-language dubbed uNL, and a description formalism for libraries of rule-based netlist transformation algorithms), and even some tools to work with two of these formalisms. It is amazing who much productive work can be done with just a vi, a K&R C compiler, and TeX (I generated TeX 'graphics' for data flow debugging), when there is nothing to disturb you.
Working within the CBC Project.
In retrospect, a good time. In theory, I was supposed to work on my thesis (the ALDiSP compiler), in practice, I worked as an "advisor" for the project, helping the students learn C++ and the framework, designing tools and algorithms, and co-authoring papers. Work on the thesis was lagging behind, because hardware synthesis and nML was much more interesting. I wrote the nML report and half a dozen papers on ALDiSP, went to a few conferences with ALDiSP papers, and had in general a good time. Oh yes, I also learned a lot about debugging large C++ programs.
One of the strangest aspects of the CBC project is how it relates to the original design I did in Munich. More than three years later (in Mid-94), when Andreas (Fauth, our "project manager") did a "Final Report" TR, we looked into the original papers and found a mixture of ideas that now look utterly naive, and concepts that are on the list of "how things should be done in the next project".
Working on the thesis.
And simultaneously looking for a job, but not hard. Again, I wrote papers and went to some conferences and workshops, just without pay. Since I don't care that much about money, there was no big incentive to speedily finish the thesis. At June 3, I wrote what is hopefully the last word of the thesis, mailed it to my prof, and started to work on two technical reports that I had planned to do (and even registered) for a year, but not got around to really start, let alone finish.
Applied for a post-doc position at U York.
And I really hope I can get this job, because it looks interesting and gives me a chance to improve my English (especially my pronunciation and colloquialisms are extremely lacking).
On and off working for a small Berlin software house, designing and implementing a highly heuristic (asexual genetic) scheduler (two weight functions and lotsa constraints). Took much longer than I originally estimated.
Working for another small Berlin software house (that pays much better, at least on paper ;-), analyzing, specifying, and demo-implementing a rather large client-server application architecture. Fun stuff, much more interesting than the scheduler, and with some totally new problems.
(02.11.95) Finally! Interview with Colin Runciman at York U.