fre:ac Developer Blog
Something about me Print
Written by Robert   
Friday, 23 February 2007 13:00

Robert Kausch After more than five years of working on the BonkEnc project, version 1.0 of BonkEnc is finally available. I think it's time to tell something about myself now. Here are some facts first:

Name: Robert Kausch
Birthday: 17 September 1982
Birth place: Neu Kaliß, MV, Germany
(a small village with around 2,000 inhabitants, I actually never lived there)
Location: Elmshorn, SH, Germany
(near Hamburg in northern Germany)
Occupation: Student 
University: Nordakademie University of Applied Sciences, Elmshorn 
Subject: Computer Science for Business
(7th semester, 1 more to go) 
Spoken languages: German, English
(some French, Japanese and Russian as well, but I just started learning) 
Open Source projects: BonkEnc, JoomlaStats, smooth class library 

I will finish university in summer '07 and currently plan to apply for a master program in software architecture then. I'd like to spend some years working abroad after I got my M.Sc., maybe in Japan or the US.

I founded the BonkEnc project back in 2001, because I didn't like the user interface of CDex. I wanted to create an application that's easy to use for beginners and powerful enough to be useful for advanced users at the same time.

Soon the project developed a life of its own. People requested this feature and that feature and my to do list grew longer and longer. I finally made a list of features that I wanted to have in a v1.0 release.

This eventually led to the release of BonkEnc v1.0 beta 1 in mid 2003. A version that I considered almost feature complete. But as more and more people started using BonkEnc, even more features were requested. I realized that beta 1 was not even near version 1.0.

Finally BonkEnc v1.0 has been released and I think it's a great product. It has almost every feature users requested in the past five years.

Development will now concentrate on BonkEnc v1.1. It will include all the features that required too many architectural changes to be included in v1.0. Support for more encoders, multi threading and multi channel support are just a few examples. And I promise it won't take another five years until the release.