New Hire at HQ: Thomas Andresen

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Our new Senior Developer has certainly come a long way in his journey to Umbraco, and we’re so excited to have him join the D-Team. He's got a lot of languages up his sleeve - programming languages that is! And maybe some German? I wonder which is harder...🤔 Let’s read what brought him to Umbraco - and all about his history of coding!

Hey, I’m Thomas and I'm the newest member of the D-Team at HQ! 👋

Big smiles - we're all glad to have Thomas here at HQ!

I started working at Umbraco HQ just over a month ago as a Senior Developer, and as part of the Core team, I’ll be working on the Umbraco CMS. As I have been working with Umbraco Forms previously, one of my first tasks is to give it a lot of love 🥰. I was certified in Umbraco Master Class 1 and 2 back in 2014, and have been working on and off with Umbraco since.

Throughout my career I have not been able to find a CMS as flexible as Umbraco, from both a developer and editor perspective - so becoming a part of Umbraco and being able to develop this platform is like a dream come true.

From Basic to Asp.Net Core

I got my first computer all the way back in 1984, an Amstrad CPC 464 with a green monochrome monitor and a tape recorder 📼. Back then it was a monster - 4 MHz, 64K of memory and 16 colours, but for the first time, I was in love 😍

What Thomas' Amstrad CPC would've looked like...

As games were quite sparse in those times, I started to look into programming: first it was BASIC, then later assembler and though I didn’t know it yet, I had formed the base for the journey would lead me here today. Later I got the Commodore Amiga 500 and 1000 and later an Intel 80286 PC, but since then my preferred platform has been the x86/x64 platform.

Through the years I have worked with very different business domains: security, fintech, public sector and even using the latest flight tracking system. I have been developing using languages like BASIC, C, C#, Typescript, JavaScript, Java, PL/SQL, Pascal, Delphi and PHP.

For the last 4 years my main focus has been on Angular and Asp.Net, the latter of which I’ll be using here! 🙌

About me

I was born back in 1975 in a city called Sønderborg near the German border. No, I don’t speak German, but when people speak to me in German I usually understand them.

Or at least I have that feeling 😳

I moved to Funen back in 1998 where I studied computer science, and where I met my wife Ditte. We have two children, Tilde and Linus. And no, he is not named after Linus Thorvaldsen 🐧, even though I am a fan, and the same story goes for Tilde ~

Thomas' kids - Linus and Tilde

When the kids, wife and the cat 🐈 are not taking up my time, I am preparing for the next half marathon - spinning in the wintertime, road bike racing in the summertime - playing squash and if I have the time, I play a round of golf.

When not doing physical torture to myself, I am volunteering at the local squash club, primarily managing their network and maintaining their Umbraco Cloud website. Other than that, I love to cook, meet with friends, play board games, brew beer and go to the cinema watching fantasy or science fiction movies!