About

Dirk Jensen is an IT systems administrator based in North Frisia, Germany. His career in IT and digital media spans more than three decades, beginning in 1991, straight out of his vocational training, with a long focus on content management and online services at a local savings bank in Bredstedt, where he worked for over twenty years. He later formalised that background with training in web development (2015) and a series of Microsoft certifications (MCP, MCSA and MCSE).

His work with networked cameras runs almost as long. In 2001 the first webcam on the market square in Bredstedt went online, a Mobotix camera operated by an external service provider on behalf of the local savings bank; Dirk provided its technical support. From 2004 he ran it technically on his own, and in 2013 he took it into private operation and moved it to a Canon DSLR driven by a Raspberry Pi — the same Bredstedt market-square camera that was later cited as a data source in a master’s thesis on machine-learning-based human action recognition. In 2016 it went from still images to live streaming, on network cameras from Axis, Dahua and Hikvision. He ran it until 2021.

Since 2017 he has built and maintained the harbour webcam at Schlüttsiel. It started out on a Canon DSLR driven by a Raspberry Pi, went live as a stream in 2019 on cameras from Dahua, Avigilon and Hikvision, and has run on Axis since 2020, up to 4K models. It streams continuously to the public and today runs on Everstra Live, Overlay and Capture.

Everstra grew directly out of this hands-on experience: tools built for his own cameras, refined over years of real operation, and now shared as free software. It reflects that background — practical, fair, and built by someone who uses it himself every day. More on the reasoning behind those choices.