my name is marc fuehnen, welcome to my life notes

about me

I'm 34 years old, born in Dortmund, made my way to Berlin 7 years ago. I live in Mitte and enjoy the pulsating atmosphere of the city's most central district. For the last 12 years I worked as a web developer.
Starting in Hamburg back in 1999 I had the chance to witness the rise of that brand new economy only to see the great bubble burst two years later. Anyway, I stuck with it and until now the last years were the most fulfilling ones creatively.

My private life is pretty much absorbed by Tennis - chasing yellow fuzzy balls has become one of my greatest passions. When not leaving marks on clay courts I'm very much into writing, not that there are any bestselling novels yet - but there will be, maybe, some day :-)

To get in touch please write an email to:
marc dot fuehnen at gmail dot com

web developer's life

I do code ...

On the backend side I work in a classic LAMP environment: PHP (OOP), mySql databases, served by Apache or Lighttpd on Debian or Ubuntu machines.

On the frontend I rely on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I'm an avid jQuery hacker and love to try out HTML5 and CSS3 where modern browsers do support it already.

Best case I'm part of a small or mid-sized team, I regularly take responsibility of filling the role of a team leader.

I'm a right brainer ...

I consider my creative side to be the dominating one. Over the last years I developed a strong creative mindset that has more and more become the number one reason why I got on board of various web projects.

I love to be involved in the early stage process of throwing around ideas and arranging those tiny little pieces to form the whole.

So if you're looking for ...

then I might be the right person to join the team.

expertise

Over the last 2 years I worked in the field of online gaming. As a result I gained expertise in various areas of the casual/browser game development process:

Besides that I enjoyed taking various tasks and responsibilities in web development projects far away from online gaming:

latest project

playnik.com

skillset

Let me introduce some good old friends of mine. Handling the following cocktail of script languages, operating systems, libraries and APIs makes my day:

Backend

Frontend

APIs

toolbox

I use a handful of tools to accomplish my everyday goals, some come and go, but those following are the ones I would take with me on a lonely island:

experimental

professional life

inspired

ideas

  • August 24th, 2010 Social Network for the Inner Circle

    Read this nice BBC article today. It basically says that people usually have an inner circle of friends that usually is not larger than 6 to 12 people.

    That's the important circle. Recommendations within this circle promise a 100% conversion rate on nearly every topic.

    So why not having a social network that concentrates 100% on the inner circle of people's friends? Guess that's the part where it shouldn't be that hard to beat FB.

    Just limit the number of friends allowed - maybe 10 is a good number ...

  • August 16th, 2010 Twitter Resumes

    I had to review lots of job applications lately and while browsing those files and papers I just thought why there isn't a standardized way to post resumes using Twitter yet.

    Would be fun to see how people manage to stuff there life into 160 characters of plain text, wouldn't it?

    It def would be less time consuming to read ...

  • August 1st, 2010 Book Recommendation Pandora-Style

    I liked music recommendation service Pandora the sec it went online. It's quite magical for a piece of software.

    What I was thinking about was a service that does book recommendations Pandora-style instead of doing it the Amazon way by just showing other titles that might be read or bought by other people or share the same genre or author.

    A better service would take also the books' content into consideration: characters, moods, settings.

    The more e-books are being sold the more there is demand for a service that knows every book's content and is able to make recommendations for further reads based on the passage I have right in front of me on my reader.

web stuff

  • August 15th, 2010 Hooked by Flattr

    I followed all the buzz about the ex-Skype-people driven startup Flattr.

    Those guys thought of how to compensate people who basically create web content that people usually consume for free, like blog articles and stuff.

    As a result they allow you to open a flattr account where you can leave small amounts of money, 2$ for example.

    Now they ask content publishers to put this little flattr button on their websites. If clicked by someone who has a flattr account they will receive a small share of the money put into that account. For example if the flattr guy has 10 bucks in his account and he clicks the flattr button 10 times over the period of one month, every publisher earns one tenth of it, that makes 1 buck each in this example.

    What can I say - it seems to work, flattr buttons are all over the place and bloggers report first income. Well done ...

  • August 3rd, 2010 Blekko - altering search results

    Once in a while there is this new startup that tries its luck in the search space.

    What usually follows right afer the first announcements is this 'dead man walking' shitstorm - we saw it with Cuil or Wolfram Alpha. Being called a potential Google killer seems to come with lots of bad Karma.

    Now there's Blekko. I finally got my invite and used it for one week exclusively (no Google at all) ... and I'm pretty surprised.

    I guess search results are quite similar to those found on Google or Bing, but there's that little difference called 'slashtags' that makes you feel more comfortable about those results spit out by Blekko.

    Blekko allows slashtags to filter your search results or to give your search a certain direction. For example if I'm unclear about the expression 'jump the gun' I add the slashtag '/define' and Blekko looks out for dictionaries only.

    Best thing about slashtags is that you can also create your own: just give it a name and add all websites you want to have searched when using this slashtag.

    Last week I created 13 slashtags and now I'm done with search ... finally my regular every-day searches are no longer littered by SEO results. Thx, Blekko!

private life

  • August 18th, 2010 Seeded 2nd on HEAD Senior Circuit Berlin

    Now that is a surprise - I just applied for playing the HEAD Senior Circuit in Berlin and as it turns out I got seeded at position 2.

    Does that mean I actually became that good or is it just a weak draw? We'll see on the weekend!

    Update 24.08.2010: Lost semi finals, won third place match, in the end ... I'm happy.

  • August 16th, 2010 The Tatort Screenplay

    Promised my girlfriend to write her a screenplay for Germany's most travelled TV crime series Tatort. I just started throwing around some ideas and decided to have the murder happening in the Berlin politics scene.

    And there's already a working title: Bundesmörder

entertainment

  • August 4th, 2010 Book: The Big Short

    I read Michael Lewis' A Big Short recently and I'm totally amazed by it.

    It's the background story of the current financial crisis told by those few bond traders and analysts who saw it coming. They not only saw it coming years ago, they bet on the disaster to happen and earned billions of dollars the minute the market crashed.

    I had a fantastic read - go get it!

  • August 2nd, 2010 Enjoying Entourage

    Entourage is heading straight for mid-season so it's time to raise some questions:

    Will Arie strike the NFL deal?
    Will Drama feal comfortable doing bananas?
    Will Turtle realize that his Tequila business just covers for something less liquid?

  • July 24th, 2010 Mad Men: don't get it

    A friend insisted to start all over again with Mad Men.

    After watching two fresh episodes I might understand all the fuzz about the original setting - but what I don't get is the storyline ... maybe next life.