GHOP students 2007-2008/Benjamin Hättasch

(The Forum ID is the same as the name, People with problems using the 'ä' might use the Name 'Haettasch' or better simply 'Ben' for calling me instead.)

I'm a 17 years old student in the 12th grade and come from Germany. I love working with computers, including programming software but also doing things in the web. I've got an own homepage for my projects and care for some other pages, one of them will be running Joomla! 1.5 in future, as soon as it works on the server of my hoster ;-). This is the page of the school magazin in wich I take part, but I'm also crazy in going dancing (standard dance) two or more times a week.

I spend a lot of time surfing through the net and reading newspages and feeds. By doing this I read about the contest. I thought it would be great to take part, so I read the rules and decided to choose Joomla! because I "played" a little bit with Joomla! 1.0 a few time ago and had to build up a new webpage now. Because I wanted to do this with Joomla! at this time and assumed that I would have to learn about programming extensions for Joomla! for realising the project, to reach my personal expections of the page, I thought why not learn this by doing and take part in the Contest, chosing Joomla!.

The Contest was great. I learned al lot about free software development: About how much work is to do, how the controll and help process in the community works and a lot about Joomla! to. It inspired me to keep on helping the Joomla! community after the end of the contest. I'm going to keep on developing extensions for Joomla! and maybe take part in one team - wich one I don't know at this time - in the future and I hope that Google will re-run this contest next year.