About me
It all started with wondering how things actually work.
Senior Software Engineer based near Düren, Germany, with more than 15 years in software development — and for five of them, also running products of my own.
How I got here
When I was sixteen, my father bought me my first PC. A few weeks later I started programming — out of curiosity.
I wanted to know how it all actually worked. How websites were built, what technology was behind them. And above all, I was drawn to making something where you see the result right away. Change a few lines, reload, take a look.
A test project came along on its own. In our neighborhood, several groups of teenagers had started their own street teams — my friends and I had one too — and some of them already had a website. So I built one for us. At first I just copied HTML snippets together, everything with inline styles — that was my first code. Then came the first lines I wrote myself.
After that, all I did was experiment. From HTML I moved on to JavaScript, because I wanted blinking animations on the page. Then came the question of how to actually store data. That's how I ended up with PHP — and I was hooked for good.
I taught myself all of it. It became my profession in 2010, when I started an apprenticeship as an IT specialist at Papaya CMS — a PHP CMS. The language I had taught myself to store data was suddenly my day job. What started out of curiosity has become fifteen years of streaming platforms, biotech cloud software and applications for public authorities.
How I work
- Operations before features
Five years of running my own product in production change how you write code. When the on-call number is your own phone, testing stops being a question of discipline. For me, test-driven development, end-to-end and performance testing aren't extras — they're what lets me sleep through the night.
- Across boundaries
Frontend, APIs, infrastructure — I've worked on all three ends, often in the same project. It helps me see what a frontend decision costs three layers further down — and the other way around.
- Passing it on
Code reviews, pair programming and mentoring junior developers are part of the work for me, not something on the side. The same goes for documentation and retrospectives: knowledge that exists in only one head is a risk — even if it's my own.
- Longevity
In the public sector I've worked on applications that have to be accessible, secure and maintainable for years. Those requirements are inconvenient, and they make software better. I'd rather build something that is still understandable in five years than something that was quick to finish today.