About

About the site

This is my personal web site. When I first set it up in 1995 all it had was a photo and an email address. The provider was Icon, the dial-up arm of the Internet Solution in South Africa. After moving to Europe I registered Wittenburg.co.uk and the site evolved into what you see now.

About the name

Wittenburg is a German family name. Its bearers originate from a German town called Wittenburg. You can read about the name's origin in English here, or here in the original German. You can read about the name's entymology on Wolfgang Wittenburg's web site Wittenburg.net.

About me

I am:

A father
A snowboarder
A scuba diver
A twin

Cape Town, January 2017

The personal stuff

I've lived on three continents, and have been to 31 countries. I'm fluent in three languages (slooowly absorbing a fourth by sheer force of exposure), have jumped out of aeroplanes, and experienced the end of the tail-end of the border war. There's titanium in my shoulder, amongst one or two other augmentations.

Personal interests include snowboarding, this web site, writing software, and building radio controlled trucks.

The professional stuff

I started programming computers in 1986 and have since worked for companies like EDS, Microsoft, and Nokia. These days I consult. Enterprise architecture, operational management, IT strategy, security, identity and access management... I also speak at events about making software, architecture, and being an IT consultant.

About the tech

Software

I hand-code Wittenburg.co.uk using .Net, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I'm not a web developer so some of the markup is probably questionable. That's ok. My goal is to keep the site fast but usable, so that rules out frameworks (JQuery, Angular, React, Polymer, Node, and so on). Yes, like raw-coding and server-side rendering, frameworks and client-side HTML rendering have their place. My non-framework-based home page has a Google PageSpeed insights index of 99 😃

Hardware

Wittenburg.co.uk was originally built using an Intel 486DX2 -based PC. The image above was taken in 2020 but isn't quite up to date either. The site is currently maintained using the following hardware and software:

● Intel Core i9 with 64Gb RAM

● Samsung 500 GB 2.5" SSD

● 2 x Western Digital 4TB mirrored disks

● NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

● Sharkoon 600 Watt power supply

● 2 x Samsung U28R55 28" 4k IPS panels

● Das Keyboard 4 Professional

● S.M.S.L M6 Hifi Audio USB DAC with headphone amplifier

● 2 x Behringer MS40 digital 40-watt stereo near-field monitors

● Sennheiser HD 650 Open back headphones

● ELP 1080P wide angle webcam

● MANLI omnidirectional condenser microphone

● Visual Studio Community 2019

● Microsoft .Net Framework 4.8

● Paint.net 4.2

● WinSCP 5.17

● Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2016

● Mozilla Firefox 82.0

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