About Karsten Dambekalns

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I am a Creative Code Engineer: I work on software, and for me developing software is–if done right–engineering, but as with most things in life, creativity gets you a long way.

I was born in Munich, Germany, in 1977. Thus I still enjoyed working with an IBM PC10-III in school, owned a Commodore 128D (plastic case, sigh…) and played games on a friend's Amiga 500. After that came a modem, a PC that was actually fast, OS/2 Warp, Windows 95, Linux, ISDN, X11 workstations (monochrome!), email and of course the internet.

Said X11 workstations I encountered while studying media science, media technology and computer science in Braunschweig. During that time I met (and promptly married) Līga, the most wonderful woman I know, and co-founded a company with a friend of mine, working on building websites for agencies and customers. Eventually I got in touch with a still young CMS called TYPO3, which caught my attention.

The rest, as they say, is history. I started to work with TYPO3, became a contributor and attended my first T3BOARD in 2004 if my memory serves me right. That triggered a chain of events that eventually made me the developer behind the DBAL extension (which is now maintained as a system extension by Xavier Perseguers, thanks!) for TYPO3 and also got involved with the TER and extension manager revamp.

The planning for that was partly done together with Robert Lemke, with whom not only a great friendship developed: we are still working together on TYPO3 Flow and Neos, two projects that have their roots back in 2005, when an unforgettable meeting in Kettrup Bjerge, Denmark, brought together a handful of key people from the TYPO3 project.

During all those years some other notable events took place: I graduated, my twin sons were born, I left the company to become a freelancer, I switched to using a Mac and moved to Lübeck, my third son was born and last but not least I launched this Neos-based website.

Source: http://karsten.dambekalns.de/about-me.html