Welcome to Michael Vorburger's homepage, v3.4

I'm 🦣 tooting as @vorburger@tooting.ch on Mastodon and 💙 post as @vorburger.ch on Bluesky (and formerly 🐦 tweeting as @vorburger), am occasionally writing up some stuff here and previously blogging here since 2012 (and from 2001-2010 blogged here), and am AKA this LinkedIn profile. May be you'll like some of my videos on YouTube? Have a look at these Great sites for kids!

I like open source, use it extensively personally, and give back by contributing when I can. May be you're interested in some of my hacking on GitHub (or my ESON at eclipse.org). I sometimes attend and speak at Tech. Events & conferences, see recorded speaking and some presentations here. I am a co-author of the book "Core Java Data Objects" (JDO). I'm on Google Scholar and ORCID. There is some other very old assorted stuff over here on this old site.

A few lines about myself would have to include that I live in my native country Switzerland, where I studied Computer Science at the Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL). My current day job since May 2019 is at Google, were I work on machine learning. Before I was 3 years with Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions. My previous day job was 10 years with TEMENOS The Banking Software Company (by way of the Odyssey Financial Technologies acquisition), where I was the Product Manager looking after all things related to Eclipse-based tooling. In 2006 I had a great year with a group called IPT. Earlier I helped build an enterprise software company called Vertical*i in Lausanne and New York for 5 years, where I quit as CTO in late 2005. Before that, I have worked at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California and at ABACUS Research in my home town of St.Gallen.

When I was 18 and before starting to study I participated in Switzerland's Youth Science Fair / Competition; fast forward 20 years later, and I now support this event by co-leading its organization, to support the next generation.

I'm interested in how to use computers to help children learn, particularly programming, and run ScratchDay.ch at EPFL in Lausanne Switzerland (with the Scratch Studio), where we tech children as young as 8 years old to grasp basic programming / logical thinking / story telling using scratch.mit.edu (see my family Scratch projects). I am particularly fascinated by the potential of Minecraft for this purpose, see also this video about a Minecraft Scratch Blockly MVP POC I hacked with a friend. In 2006-2008 I was involved with OLPC.ch.

I maintain fineract.dev hosting, and contribute at the Apache Software Foundation to an open source software which brings financial services to the world’s 2 billion underbanked and unbanked for fintech innovation for financial inclusion, by providing community support on mailing lists and with code, see my commits to Apache Fineract since 2013, and my commits in the original Mifos from 2010-2012 (as well as Mifos X in between) as well as e.g. related Mifos.org posts or this article in French from a conference), and supported the project by serving as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor to coach students, most directly in 2013 and 2020.

According to (old) logs, frequently visited articles on this site are How To set-up two-way (mutual) SSL in Tomcat, an Spring Security/Acegi XFire blurb and my very own HTTP Server in Java. During 1998-2000 I had put together the previous version ("v2") of the vorburger.ch site. Particularly popular pages on it were my KISSfp Web Tool, a Web Style Guide I wrote long ago, and my early ALTifier, Face Recognition and Proxy Server projects. BTW: The vorburger.ch domain started with a v1 in 1997, before I even started studying CS at university.

I hope some of the content on this site may be of interest or useful to you. This is a personal site and does not reflect the views of any past or present employer, client or affiliate. Enjoy! M.