About Johannes

My name is Johannes Passing, I live in Berlin, Germany, hold an M.Sc. in Software Engineering from Hasso-Plattner-Institute in Potsdam and currently work for Finn as a software developer.

Although I have done quite a bit of applications programming in the past, I’d mainly consider myself a systems programmer. Technology-wise, and this is hard to miss when reading this blog, my primary focus is C/C++ development on Windows. This has not always been the case — until around 2003, I have largely been avoiding Windows and have used Linux and FreeBSD almost exclusively — I have probably been a Unix-fanboy even. However, the more I learned about the beauty of COM, Win32 and, most importantly, the NT kernel, the more I transitioned back to Windows.

Win32, COM, and WDM programming has since been my primary interest. In 2008, I also was lucky enough to been given the chance to work with the Windows Research Kernel, i.e. the source code of the Windows NT kernel. Having got my fingers on the original NT source code and having written my master thesis about Dynamic Tracing of Windows NT kernel mode components has reinforced my admiration for NT.

Despite all passion for Windows, however, the reality is that in Germany, the number of positions for Windows system developers is infinitesimal — which makes Java development, which I have pursued for around ten years by now, a slightly less thrilling, yet more profitable skill. It is thus not Windows development, but rather mainly server side Java development, debugging, and performance optimization that has paid my bills over the last years. An example for my recent activity in this regard is the PONS online dictionary, for which I wrote the backend (i.e. searching facilities, clustering etc) as part of my work at Finn.

In my free time, I have been working on cfix, a unit testing framework for C/C++, for over a year now. cfix is open source and, to the best of my knowledge, still is the only unit testing framework that equally supports both user and kernel-mode testing. In recent times, much effort has also went into developing cfix studio, which is a Visual Studio AddIn that is built on top of the cfix framework.

Other useless facts out my private life include: I love heavy metal, Judas Priest, Megadeth and Metallica in particular, i am a regular runner and a marathon finisher and truly hate puzzle questions and similar silly games.

For further information, you can have a look at my LinkedIn or Xing profile or write an email to jpassing at acm dot org.