Markus is originally from Bressanone, a small city in northern Italy. However, he is only there during the summer months. For the last three and a half years, Markus has been studing telematics (informatics, telecommunication, and electrical engineering) at the Graz University of Technology in Austria. More recently, Markus was a computer science exchange student in Helsinki, Finland.

If programmers got paid to remove code from software instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better. Nicholas Negroponte

Markus has used a number of CMSs and has yet to find one that makes him "really happy". He is interested in working with SilverStripe as an emerging open source CMS, and because he believes "it's a great piece of software". He is looking forward to contributing to an international team of web developers, and improving his English.

Markus will be working on improving security and adding security features (e.g OpenID) to SilverStripe, with help from mentor Hayden Smith.