René was born in the year of Atari's founding and the release of the game Pong. Since his early youth he started taking things apart to see how they work. He couldn't even pass construction sites without looking for electrical wires that might seem interesting. The interest in computing began when his grandfather bought him a 4-bit microcontroller with 256 byte RAM and a 4096 byte operating system, forcing him to learn assembler before any other language. After finishing school he went to university in order to study physics. He then collected experiences with a C64, a C128, two Amigas, DEC's Ultrix, OpenVMS and finally GNU/Linux on a PC in 1997 (let's leave out the wonderful world of Windows 3.11/95/NT4). He is using Linux since this day and still likes to take things apart und put them together again. Freedom of tinkering brought him close to the Free Software movement, where he puts some effort into the right to understand how things work - which he still does. René is currently occupied with system administration (old school, I know), teaching at the University of Applied Sciences Technikum Wien and Burgenland, conducting secure coding/design trainings, security/penetration/compliance testing, and writing lecture notes.