Topconf: What excites you about working in the IT industry?
Christoph: The constant changing environment and challenges. There’s probably no other industry where it is so important to keep on top and stay interested to learn about new topics, frameworks, way to solve your issue.

Topconf: What do you like most about your job? What do you like least?
Christoph: Let’s start with the bad one, it is stressful, it costs weekends and you’re on a constant jetlag. On the other side I love traveling the world, meeting new people, tasting the world’s food. Especially the last part is really really enjoyable! :-)

Topconf: What is your motivation to speak at Topconf Tallinn 2016?
Christoph: Been there before and it was time to come back to Tallinn. The years before it was always challenging to find the time to come to Topconf, but I really love the style, the combination of technical and less-, to non-technical but soft-skill driven talks. The latter ones are sometimes more interesting than technical talks, as I would normally not go to a conference having those kinds of sessions.

Topconf: What sessions are you giving at Topconf Tallinn and what will be the take away for the participants?
Christoph: I actually have two sessions. One is about the future of Java (A Post-Apocalyptic sun.misc.Unsafe World). It presents some in-flight ideas, their current proposals and prototypes but also sells dreams of what might come. An ever changing slide deck on top of the current development. The second talk (Distributed Computing. Simplified.) talks about distributed systems and that it is not as hard as people might think to go distributed, as long as you have the right tool.

Topconf: What is you life/career motto?
Christoph: Life needs to be challenging, otherwise it would be boring.