FrankHeimes

about 12 years ago

how my girl friend drew me 10 years later


Contact Information

Name

Frank Heimes

Email

<frank.heimes@canonical.com>

Launchpad

https://launchpad.net/~fheimes

Profile

My name is Frank Heimes <frank.heimes@canonical.com> and I'm located in Böblingen/Germany.
Since 2016 I work in Canonical's Hardware Enablement Team (formerly known as Hyperscale Enablement Team), in short HWE https://launchpadlibrarian.net/156514081/M31-14x14.png team.
I'm a computer scientist, having worked for Siemens and IBM before.

Who I am

I'm a German electronics and computer-'Verrückter' (not to say nerd) that grew up in the Rhine/Ruhr area close to Neuss/Düsseldorf (hence I like 'Altbier' Smile :-) ) and later moved to Böblingen - for business reasons.
I'm still living in Böblingen (in the south-western area of Germany, close to the black-forest) with my wife Steffi and Lilo our cat.
I still like spending some time at the computer, even in my spare time, like to travel - cat and garden are other hobbies, as well as watching SciFi and my rattly classic car (becoming soon 32 years old - that's what I call sustainable!).

Early days

My first (home) computer was a Commodore VC64 (enjoying Basic) - also known as 'breadbin'.
At school I came in touch with a Schneider/Amstrad CPC 664, yeah school times were tough ... ;-)
Then I moved on to the Commodore Amiga family (enjoying [Lattice] C and Modula II) - initially an Amiga 1000, later the 2000 (with a Fujitsu 5.1/4" double height 1GB hard disk, that I bought on a vacation in the US and took back home - it was as expensive as the computer itself and also had a Motorola 68k chip on the board again like the Amiga 2000 itself =) ).
At some point in time someone donated his old XT to me (with original Borland Turbo C), but with just 4.7 MHz (or so) it was horribly slow.
Then I got my first (really) usable PC, it was an AMD 386DX-40 and 8MB of RAM (people called me crazy for having 8MB of RAM). I started of course using DOS and Windows 3.x, but got soon bored - and a friend of mine gave me a bunch of 5.1/4 floppy disks with a relatively new open source operating system on it - it was a copy of Slackware -- the first time I got in touch with Linux! I thought it was Slackware 2.1 - but I also remember having used a kernel 0.99.<something>, so I could be a bit wrong with the version ...
As 'graphic card' (I think the term GPU was not invented yet) I had a fantastic Tseng Labs ET4000! I of course had to write my entire XFree86 config file by hand (incl. figuring out the mode-lines) and was very proud when I saw my first X-Windows screen!
I tried out some more Linux distros, like SLS, DLD and SUSE (yeah, the last two were inevitable for a German these days Wink ;-) and later Gentoo.
With the age of 17 I started to learn a profession (electronics), where I still used Linux, but also commercial UNIXes, like SINIX (System-V from Siemens-Nixdorf), SunOS and Solaris - especially later when I studied computer science.

My way to Ubuntu

After my time at Siemens, I joined the IBM R&D lab in Böblingen/Germany (the reason to move ~400km), where I loved to work for almost the entire time in the area of Linux (sw and hw) - but mostly SLES and RHEL.
But at some point in time a volunteer workstation OS project started at big-blue (called Open Client Debian Community, OCDC) and I helped out, became involved and maintained a dozen of packages (since the other Linux distro that could be used on the workstation sucked).
Even if it was called Open Client Debian Community, most people in that community used 'Ubuntu' - what is that (at that time)?!
So I strove Dapper Drake / 6.06 LTS (yepp, the only ".06" Wink ;-) ) and really started to fell in love with Hardy Heron / 8.04 LTS (on private and business machines - I still like the wallpaper).
And a couple of years later, a company called 'Canonical' was looking for someone to help-out with getting Ubuntu (Server) on 'big-iron' and since I worked at IBM on 'big-irons' at that time and had some Ubuntu experiences due to the volunteer project, I thought that this is the next thing I really want to do and work on - which ended in me joining Canonical early in 2016.
Since then I'm a member of Canonical's Server Commercial Engineering (SCE) team (former Hardware Enablement, HWE), mainly working on IBM Z (s390x) and Power (ppc64el).

Collateral


FrankHeimes (last edited 2022-01-12 14:44:36 by fheimes)