My name is Christian Kemp. For most of the past 44 years I’ve lived in the country of Luxembourg, in the heart of Europe.

Professional career

For the first 10 years of my professional career I worked as a developer (Powerbuilder, SQL), mostly in the bank sector and at the Luxembourg stock exchange.

In 2009, I pivoted to a career in the public sector by becoming part of a small IT team at the Judicial Administration. My work initially concentrated on application development (Visual Studio VB.net and C#), database creation and maintenance (SQL Server) and some server management, then for a number of years I handled deployment, support and training for all our Windows workstations. More recently, my seniority and long-term experience has meant I’ve had to take on a more management role, now heading the support team.

I also freelance as a sports photographer for Luxemburger Wort, Luxembourg’s biggest-selling daily newspaper. Since 2006, I’ve covered around 100 sports assignments per year, all of which are also available on my personal photography site, photo.lu.

Running

I used to define myself as a track&field athlete, or more specifically a sprinter. The peak of my athletics career was from about 1998 to 2003. In 1998, I managed to set a Luxembourgish 200m indoor national record (22″00), which I’ve since lost to faster athletes. Further achievements were halted by a recurring battle with chronic Achilles tendon inflammation that started in 2000 and resulted in a partial tear. Despite getting operated that same year, the left Achilles tendon was still flaring up over the following years. As a result, I stopped competitive sprints in early 2006. After a few years break, I started competing intermittently as a masters athlete, albeit at a much lower performance level before more injuries kept me away from the track for a couple of years.

With the decline of my sprinting abilities, I switched over to trail and mountain running, mostly in the form of  Vertical Kilometer races, Skyrunning as well as “normal” trails ranging from 10km to 42km in length.

About this site

I’ve had an online presence at ckemp.com since 1998. This site has served (at various times) my personal homepage, blog, picture gallery and online CV.

For most of its existence, ckemp.com was powered by custom-written Perl scripts running on top of Apache/Perl/MySQL. A few years ago, I switched over to a self-hosted WordPress solution in the hopes that this would allow me to concentrate on content, rather than spending time re-inventing the wheel by maintaining a custom back-end.