About DASPRiD

General

My name is Ben Scholzen alias DASPRiD. I was born 1986 in Engelskirchen, Germany, and grew up in Bonn. After I finished my secondary school leaving certificate in 2004, I moved to Karlsruhe, to do an apprenticeship as media designer. In 2007 I finished my final exams and worked for about half a year in the same company. At the beginning of 2008 I started a new job at a friend's company. Since then I'm working from my home office, while staying in Karlsruhe, but I may move to another location somewhere in the future.

In my spare time I'm always listening to music, while I'm doing things. Such are creating levels for FPS games, programing scripts and programs in PHP or Python, and playing the games itself as well. In the time which is left, I like to play solos on my e-guitar.

A deeper look

As my great wish for the future was to work in the PC gaming industry, I joined the open source development team "Darklegion Development" and it's game Tremulous in the end of 2006 with the aim of getting more envolved into game development. As a first step there I created a totally new website with a more pleasing design. Around that time, I created several maps, which I did release as single packages. To enhance my english knowledge, I started an online radio, which is running weekly with the latest news about Tremulous and it's community, called TremRadio.

As I am a guy of "learning by doing", I learned different programing languages in my life since I was 8 years old. But I did never like languages like C or Delpi, so I etablished my main knowledge in the two script languages PHP and Python. Primarily in PHP I learned a lot of coding compliant to rules and object-oriented programing. Lately I got more and more in touch with the Zend Framework, with which this website is also created with. Tremstats, one of my most complex projects in the past, will also be fully rewritten with this framework. As everything else, I did also learn to work with this framework by creating this website. Before I knew this framework, I mostly wrote all of my projects with GPL software like PHP Mailer, AdoDB and other helpful extensions. But as this framework offers all those things, I no longer have the need for them.

Meaning of the nickname

Many guys did ask me all the time, what my nickname means. Well, the answer is quite simple: it has no meaning. A long time ago, I was in a clan of the game Urbanterror. Before I joined this clan, I had the nickname Dark Predator. At some time, I got bored about that name and decided to choose another one. As my two clan leaders got the name DASGiB and DASKAjA, we invented this nickname in a night session. Well, and that's all. No magic, no deeper thoughs, just some random name.