CV

The end of the year brought something new: a new start into something I wanted to do for a long time.
I wanted and want to build products: for myself and for others.

Building digital solutions, products, call it whatever you want, is a lot of fun. Now I enjoy to do it on and for my own. Let’s see where the journey goes. I will keep you posted.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Just everything ;-)

My work in the finance sector was split into two parts: WEB2 and WEB3. Our company that once did analysis of credit and financing models changed over the years into a WEB3 company developing solutions for building stablecoins. My part spread across a variation of topics: from building data processing pipelines, over the design of RESTful/GraphQL-based microservices and building classical web backend application to connect Vue.js-based frontends to it.

As the company expected a lot of financial data coming either from our bank and/or from the blockchain, we used Kafka to store the data centrally. This turned out to be not the right decision which led in the end to a custom build event store solution by our own.

After years of in-house managing a Kubernetes cluster in AWS we moved to an IaaS/Paas (render, railway) service to let our services be purely managed by the developers themselves. I was involved in moving our microservices into the new environment including first setups and connection amongst them.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Building RESTful/GraphQL-based microservices
• Consuming financial transactions via EBICS
• Creating a highly modular monolith from scratch for managing SWIFT and Blockchain transactions
• Building a custom Event Store

Programming languages and tools:

• PHP (Symfony Framework), Python
• Gitlab, Docker
• JIRA, Confluence

A new year, a new challenge. With a largely distributed international team I was in charge of creating new digital solutions. Managing people abroad, introducing strong software development guidelines and pipelines that forster an environment for quick software release processes was a big challenge, that I enjoyed taking on.

Moving from code repositories on local devices to Gitlab including build pipelines, documentation in Confluence and ensuring software is delivered within time was very exciting. Building things on a green field compared to established processes and solutions - everything has its pros and cons.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Leading a multinational remote team for developing a web-based hyperlocal ad system
• Setting up deployment pipelines and code quality processes for a microservice architecture
• Implementing work and communication processes for a newly created development team

Programming languages and tools:

• PHP (Laravel)
• Gitlab, Docker
• Confluence

My first dip into the tourism sector. The mid-sized company was not very modern in regards to the IT. It was more or less a one man show with a mixture of Microsoft tooling (MS Access, whut?) and Linux servers. I wore a lot of different heads back then, most of them at the same time: Software Developer, Architect and Head of IT. Me and my team, that I hired, equipped the old-fashioned in-house-IT with a ticket system, version-controlled software development and clear communication standards with internal stakeholders and external service providers.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Building an IT team from one up to five people with direct reporting to managing directors
• Modernize legacy in-house systems, defining exchange interfaces, virtualize services (Docker)
• Streamline communication with external service providers

Programming languages and tools:

• PHP, Wordpress
• Docker
• Mantis Bugtracker

After years as Project Manager inside a web agency, I decided that I would love to work on the other side - helping the customer to manage their products. Being responsible for communic

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Communication with internal stakeholders and the web agency, that developed the Magento Online Shop
• Building feature pipelines that could be regularly shipped to the production system
• Keeping costs withing an aggreed range to build a broder online presence

I was not able to really start off in this company due to some private reasons. Unfortunately this company does not exist anymore due to bankruptcy.

Doing freelance work has always been a dream for me. Back then I was approached by friends and colleagues, that needed Magento-based online shops. As I did development for Magento before my current job here, and still was involved into this topic in general, because I was working in this field, I started a side business. And it lasted for a very long time. I focused on Magento online shops, clients and companies that needed immediate help with their shops.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Features and bugfixing for existing online shops
• Migration from Magento 1 to 2
• Trainings for Magento 1 and 2
• Start building various open source solutions for Magento and later Laravel

From software development into project management - a new chapter began. With a focus to technical specifications I was managing projects for online shops and websites for tourism, fashion and the publishing industry. Leading international rollout in multiple countries at the same time, coordinating product pipelines and release cycles, and lastly keeping a steady cash flow through my clients were key tasks.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Transferring requirements into technical demands for software development
• Technical and business control of customer projects, ongoing improvement of quality and implementation
• Ensuring a predictible cash inflow through client projects

My first job in Software Development started in a small team in a German mid-size company developing software for the publishing industry. Me and my team were doing the data preparation to publish ads online by extracting data coming from PDF, CSV and XML files.

Key topics and responsibilities:

• Writing parsers for ad systems to render information coming from print into online systems
• Building multi-step pipelines for data parsers in Perl
• Implementing import mechanisms for mass processing of CSV and XML data, keyword recognition

Programming languages and tools:

• Perl
• PHP
• Subversion… gosh, see how old I am ;-)