About Me

This is my personal vanity press. While I’m usually very busy I ponder many things and always have been happy to be opinionated. Thus I will use this place for my ramblings about life, the universe and everything else. Especially my personal interests.

I consider myself part artist, part dreamer, part visionary (or hallucionary as some of my friends like to state), part business man, part computer scientist, part historian and part game designer. I usually am busy with one of those things, quite often with many of them at once.

I was born on July 2nd, 1971, in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, started school in the Grundschule Röttgersweg in Gelsenkirchen-Hassel, remained there from 1976 to 1980 and then progressed towards my Abitur at the Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Gelsenkirchen-Buer, where I finished in 1990. From then I studied computer science and economics at the University of Dortmund, where I graduated with my diploma in 1998 with “cum laude”. Additionally I received the Hans-Uhde-Award and the “Deutsche Software-Engineering-Preis der Denert-Stiftung” (the german software engineering award of the Denert foundation). Afterwards I spent a year of civilian service at the “Psychologische Beratungsstelle Marl” and progressed from there to my work life. Between 1992 and 2001 I also actively maintained ADOM, once one of the most successful free computer games of the world (if I remember correctly it was voted the most successful game of 1997, even beating games like Doom).

The first two years of my work life I spent at the PRO DV Software AG, then went back to the University of Dortmund for a year, where we then founded the QuinScape GmbH. Today I am one of three CEOs of the QuinScape GmbH, a German IT company with about 136 employees. Our company specializes on enterprise application development, data integration, analytics and collaborative project management. Technically our teams focus on Java and JavaScript technologies, especially in combination with the Spring framework. We are the premier partner in Germany for Talend, Tibco Analytics, cPlace, Intrexx and Kony. Besides having been a regular speaker at the JAX and W-JAX conferences for a while I also was a member of the advisory board for the W-JAX 2009 and hosted the first Java Code Camp – Spring together with Eberhard Wolff from SpringSource – both of which were a lot of fun.

In November of 2009 I finished my Ph.D. studies and defended my thesis. Since February, 24th,  2010 I am officially allowed to call myself “Dr.-Ing. Thomas Biskup” which gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling 😉

Today QuinScape takes up most of my time. In my spare time I enjoy travelling (all over the world), photography (Canon & Leica), working on various roleplaying games (Hexer & Helden, Gaia Gamma, The Fantasy Game), programming ADOM and Ultimate ADOM – its sucessor.