About me

I am Franz Liedke, web developer and open-source enthusiast from Berlin, Germany.

I finished my studies of IT-Systems Engineering with a Master of Science from the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam.

Much of the time I have besides my job as a developer at openHPI, I use to co-lead the development of Flarum. Designed by Toby Zerner, Flarum is a next-generation forum software that's made to be easy to use, extend and install.

To build Flarum, we're using components of the Laravel web development framework. Since I discovered Laravel, I have been an enthusiastic learner, used it for quite a few projects, and have become a core contributor and meetup founder.

My enthusiasm for forum software was born from my involvement in the FluxBB development team. FluxBB is a free, open-source forum software that strives to be fast, light-weight and easy to use while only offering the features that are essential for running a forum. I found FluxBB when I was literally searching for a forum that was easy to install and just worked. FluxBB is still maintained - it is considered mostly feature-complete, but I am currently working on modernizing the aging PHP codebase.

I like to program in PHP, but have lots of experience with Ruby and JavaScript, too.