About Me
My name is Marco Bungart. Online, I go by the moniker Turing85 (Why?) and use the little guy in the upper left as avatar (What’s that thing?). I am a Senior Software Engineer at consol.de. I like games (digital and analog), good food (especially ramen!) and animals, especially birds.
The following is a collection of things that I think define me as a person. If you are more interested in hard facts, then feel free to look at my CV.
Origins
de.wikipedia.org)I was born in Cologne, Germany, on "Rosenmontag" ("Shrove Monday"). But I do not really like Carneval. I love, however, Cologne. It has a rich history, reaching back well over 2000 years. Most people think that Cologne was founded by the romans as military colony, then as province under the name "Germania Inferioer", and finally promoted to the city "Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium". But the history reaches back even further. And then, of course, there is the Cathedral of Cologne. It was in construction for 632 years. And, even though it is a cathedral, it is owned by itself (swr.de).
Profession
gamefabrique.com)I am a Software Engineer by passion. My first contact with computers was when I was four or five years old; we had a desktop computer for a week, borrowed from a friend. My dad and I discovered Sokoban (en.wikipedia.org). From this moment on, I was hooked. Of course, my mind back then was all about games and playing them. But the pure idea that I could do things ("writing code" was not yet in my vocabulary) was something that excited me.
Some time later, in elementary school, we were told to "draw what you want to become later on". I drew myself, leaning over a Cathod-ray tube (en.wikipedia.org), with a text underneath:
I want to work with computers, or I want to become a veterinarian.
In 8th grade, we had Electronic data processing at school. It boiled down to Excel and Word. I remember it being interesting at first (especially Excel), but then boring.
sydlexia.com)In 10th grade, I had the luck to get in to the computer science class of our school (and the neighboring school, we shared a campus). This was, I would say, the first time that I "wrote code". My first programming language was Logo (el.media.mit.edu). The language has all constructs that are necessary to get started with programming. But most importantly, Logo gives instant visual feedback. I fondly remember typing in some code to draw a regular polygon (en.wikipedia.org) just to find out that I calculated the angles wrong, and my pentagon became a pentagram.
When the time actually came to choose a job (I was 19 at the time), I had three things in mind:
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Something with computers ("D’Uh!")
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Falconer (Did I mention that I love birds?)
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Goldsmith
To become a falconer (in Germany), one has to
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either Study veterinary medicine, or
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be a hunter
I wasn’t a hunter, and studying veterinary medicine wasn’t something young m e wanted to do, so this was off the table.
Goldsmiths were already pretty rare back in the day, and finding one who takes apprentices was next to impossible, so this was off the table as well.
So "Something with computers" it was, and the rest - as they say - is history 🙂
