Philipp Stiefel was born in September 1975 in Kassel. He qualified for university entrance at Wilhem-Filcher-School, Wolfhagen in 1994. After completing his compulsory military service in 1995, he moved to Frankfurt am Main and began the study of pharmacy at the Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-University in 1996.

Soon he realized that pharmacy was not to be his profession for life, so he quit university and started and completed an apprenticeship as advertisement specialist in a major dialog-marketing-agency in Frankfurt am Main.

There he first came in contact with database applications. While working as team leader at that company he soon realized that many of the existing database applications used at that company were far from being as effective as possible. After all his suggestions to improve those applications were declined because the lack of resources, he decided that, even while having almost no programming knowledge at that time, he himself should take on the task of writing an improved application for his company in his spare time.

The first application of the newcomer software architect, a Visual-Basic-Frontend to an Oracle-Database, was far from being perfect. But nevertheless the application was deployed in a real production environment and was an impressing success. As a reward for his achievements in software development he was assigned a new position within the IT-team of the company. From now on he was responsible for developing, testing and supporting many of the database applications used within the company. There he gained deep knowledge of technologies like Microsoft Access, Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Active Server Pages and the Oracle-Database-Server.

After Philipp Stiefel had been awarded the title "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Microsoft Access" by Microsoft Inc. for his outstanding support to customers in the Microsoft peer to peer newsgroups in the summer of 2000, he decided to leave his employer and become a consultant for database-application-development.

Since then he was working in several software development projects, using technologies like Microsoft Access, Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Active Server Pages, Microsoft SQL-Sever, Oracle Database Server, Sybase Adaptive Server, MySQL and PHP.

Among these Projects were:

A database driven Web-Application for a major bank to display and compare information about funds and to send newsletters to customers. This application was built using Microsoft-Active-Server-Pages and a Microsoft-Access-Database-Backend.

A Microsoft-Access-ADP-Application using Microsoft SQL-Sever as backend to manage information about real-estate-credits for another major bank.

He is also advising and supporting the in-house developer-team of a major printing shop with the development of the company's new controlling- and reporting-application built with Microsoft-Access-97 and a Sybase-Adaptive-Server-Backend.

His last major project, lasting for more than a year with a team of 5 developers, was the development of a mission critical inventory control system for a major waste-deposit and recycling company in the Rhein-Main-Area. The core components of this application were an Oracle 8.1.7 Database and a Microsoft-Access-2000-Frontend. While initially just starting as a developer in that project, his responsibilities soon extended to quality assurance and project management.

Besides his engagement as an application developer he is also active as an IT-trainer and held several IT-seminars about application development with Microsoft Access and Microsoft SQL Server.



Current as of Feb. 01. 2003