Who would have thought that someone who has been taught how to disassemble Shakespeare sonnets and how to write about Australia’s colonial heritage at length would end up concerning himself with the Internet, particularly with eCommerce and online-marketing? A first hint at this no-so-usual career choice could have been gathered from my PhD thesis, where I tried to work my shared interest of English literature and the Internet into an analysis of whether fictional hypertexts on the internet work within the analytical paradigms of classical narratology (Hypertextual Fiction on the Internet – A Structural and Narratologial Analysis).
Scene 1: Southern England
In 98/99 I took part in an Exchange program and spend two semesters studying English literature and linguistics at the University of Reading, near London. I made friends with Kris, a guy from Hereford, brilliant, eloquent and with the darkest of humours. He was studying business administration, worked in a supermarket and already had a very clear idea of what he wanted to become later on. Now he’s got a Phd and – works for a large British retailer. At the time I admired his focus and his discipline to become proficient in his own area. In contrast, I was more focussing on doing several things at once, which one day earned me this remark:
Zenner, you’re becoming a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none
Indeed I like to think of myself as being a generalist. Being a career changer in the first place, I’ve never concentrated on one tiny aspect of the IT world but rather tried not to loose sight of the larger picture. Of course I’ve been concentrating on PHP/MySQL applications for several years now, have gotten to know Magento pretty well and have developed several extensions which would probably identify me as a decent coder. Yet I don’t really feel like a developer and happily busy myself with things as web analytics, search etc.
Scene 2: Western Australia
It was in the Australian summer of 2000, where I had the incredible chance of studying at the University of Western Australia for a year. This was also the time where I kept hammering basic HTML into the computer science labs’ bubbly and coloured 1st generation iMacs to compile basic websites. At one of those infamous summer-night-get-togethers with kilos of steak sizzling on the Barbie and VB being kept cool by stubby-holders I talked to my friend Anthony about the benefits of having enough RAM to be able to handle a lot of websites opened next to each other (what an amazingly gripping subject!). We continued talking about similar worldshaking subjects the whole night, when at one stage he said:
Roman, you’re the geekiest non-geek I’ve ever met.
Everybody has a different opinion on what really makes a geek. For me, it’s somebody who has been exposed to some sort of information technology from very early on, has a knack for natural sciences and embraces every new gadget that comes along. Although during the last year, admittedly I seem to have turned into an Apple fanboy – something I will have to explore in the blog later on – I got caught by computers at a pretty late stage. When it comes to science I mostly don’t have a clue and I don’t even know which CPU has been built into the Macbook I’m using to write this. But maybe these are all lame excuses after all …
This website
This guy on the frontpage is me, simple as that. No tie. No marketing lingo. Just the guy offering his opinion on matters that he thinks drive the Internet and eCommerce in particular. It has been designed by my buddy Christoph Zillgens, who in my opinion has done an amazing job at creating a beautiful and clear WordPress theme. It uses HTML5 and CSS3 and is by no means and in any way optimised for IE6 and the likes. You’d like to read opinions on recent events? – Please consider upgrading to a recent browser then.
Update: In the meantime, Christoph has published a blog post talking about what exactly he has done to make this site look and feel as it does now: Blog redesign romanzenner.com