Christian is quite possibly the happiest and most smiling person you will ever meet. He’s working on the front end design of Sakai 3 and CamTools and will be using his sunny personality (as well as technical ability) to make the site user friendly and approachable Translating the power of tools our developers have created into an easy to use and intuitive design is no easy task, but one that Christian relishes. He’s also busy contributing to the open source community and uses his expertise to help other universities and institutions design widgets for their instances of Sakai.
He first joined us as an Erasmus student from Howest University, at the same time as his colleague Simon. Joining CARET provided him with the ideal first step in his career – ‘I have the chance to work on many different projects and with different clients, to learn new [programming] languages and to interact with so many talented people’. He was encouraged to come back to CARET full time as most other jobs in his area require programmers to limit themselves to one programming language and one task. At CARET he says ‘You are given a wide range of opportunities, I love that decisions are open to discussion and that I have responsibility and the opportunity to learn through experience’
Christian’s first foray into web design was aged 11, when he helped a teacher to design a website for his school. He admits it was slow, clunky and not very pretty, but teachers, pupils and parents loved it. This spurred him on and throughout high school he taught himself CSS and HTML, deciding that he would go to college to study Web Technology
Christian is an experienced sailor and started aged 13. He spent the summer of 2009 teaching people to sail catamarans. He really loved seeing other people experience sailing for the first time, and noticed that some have an innate ability – a feel for the water, the wind and the boat. There are few places Christian would rather be than relaxing on the open water in a boat, quiet and calm. He says it’s difficult to describe the feeling of sailing for the first time, but once you’ve tried it it’s impossible to stop.
Contact Details
cv268 @ cam.ac.uk
01223 (7)65500
CARET
1st Floor, 16 Mill Lane
Cambridge
CB2 1SB
