Candidates for BCC Election 2021

Ralf Merz

About me

Dear reader, most of the community members know me as "merzilla" and Mr. #t3quetsche, I guess. I started working with TYPO3 back in 2003, and since 2006 I could also always attend the official and unofficial TYPO3 events like DevDays, Conference and the legendary TYPO3camps. Im 41 years old, living "in the middle" of Stuttgart and the Lake Constance in a small village (but getting 500 MBit/s :D ) with my wife, our 18 year old daughter, Frodo the Bernese Mountain dog and "Fee", our cat (the other cat was "Lilli", so we had "lillifee"). Since my childhood I play music. Besides the #t3quetsche I can play the Organ, Piano, Trumpet and Baritone, Percussions and Drums. So that's my lovely hobby. That's why I am member of the music club Musikverein Ostdorf sind more than 32 years now. The club is one of 80 members of the "Blasmusik-Kreisverband Zollernalb e.V." where I am the CEO. We have about 5600 active musicians. I got my High School graduation in 2000 and after 1 year at the military I studied Communications- and Software-Engineering at the University Albstadt-Sigmaringen, where I became a Graduate engineer in 2006. As I had my internship semesters at the Heindl Internet AG in Tübingen, I could then start becoming an employee there. In 2009 I left Tübingen and joined Lightwerk in Stuttgart for 3 years. Since the autumn 2012 I was working in Switzerland for the INM AG which later made a fusion with PlanNet Suisse AG. Since July 2020, as the Swiss IT had been cancelled and outsourced, I am currently working at the non-profit organization Finanztip Verbraucherinformation GmbH. Besides being an employee I started my freelancing label "merzilla" in 2009 where I created some little projects for some friendship customers. Since about 6 years I am a TYPO3 Association Bronze Member.

Your motivation

As you can see, I'm used to be part of the TYPO3 community since almost 18 years now and during my whole life I did unsalaried jobs like being CEO, conductor, member of the IT-Team for the BVBW (Blasmusik Verband Banden-Württemberg). I like doing something good for people in joining those non-profit organizations. Playing music makes people happy. Such an organization, also like TYPO3 Association, still needs some unsalaried people doing the administrative tasks. That's where I want to help the TYPO3 project as being a member of the BCC. I'm not the best PHP developer and have not the resources you do a lot of patching, reviewing and fixing for the core. At least there has been some little code snippets that made it into core in the past (yay), and I want to improve that still in the future. I like to teamwork and communicate with others and maybe can bring my CEO experience from the "Kreisverband" into the BCC and help our TYPO3 Association with the administrative tasks.

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