I live in Mönchengladbach (Germany, very close to the German/Dutch border) and work in Cologne. I've been born 1969, am married and have two children (born 1997 and 2001).
My first contribution to open source software has been a patch to Gnuplot in 1993 or 1994, I desperately needed to plot some graphs on my Atari ST. At that time I was studying physics at the Heinrich Heine Universität in Düsseldorf. I finished with the Diplom (a theoretical work on the growth of two-dimensional crystals) which I've been told is roughly equivalent to a Master's degree.
I've started to contribute to Apache Ant in the spring of 2000, became an Ant committer in June 2002 and a member of the ASF in October 2000 (yes, I agree it's been too early). I'm a member of the Jakarta PMC since spring 2002 and the PMCs for Ant and Gump since they've been formed. I'm serving as the Chairman for the Gump PMC.
I'm a user of many of the other Jakarta projects and a regular contributor to Gump and try to keep projects building. I'm one of the moderators for the Ant and Gump mailing lists.