It once began with a programmable pocket calculator. Well, actually it had started much earlier with those monochrome lines of Basic on a Wang computer at school. That was the time when procedural list calculations were stored on the magtapes of music cassettes.
Years later - on the pocket calculator - Sebastian Böthin rediscovered the magic of recursion, while he implemented a prime number test on that device. And than, while catching up on his A-levels during the day, at night he programmed fractal screen savers in Assembler and Turbo-Pascal. Soon the DOS window became too small and the first Linux machine came into the house – together with C, scripting languages, makefiles, and the classes of C++.
While studying mathematics and information technology, he got to understand the internet and coded a lot in Java. Moreover, there were brand-new disciplines to learn: functional programming and λ-calculus, runtime estimations and numeric algorithms, cryptography and computer algebra.
Earlier, after the Wang and before the pocket calculator, Sebastian Böthin did some very different things as well: An apprenticeship as a carpenter, followed by a time as a freelance graphic designer. Today he is living and working as a software developer in Berlin.
