Hey :-)
Let’s start improving things
in the digital age together.
About me
By designing user-interfaces as a hobby in the late 2000’s, I identified a trait of myself that drives me day to day, the urge to solve problems and improve for the better. Over the years I progressed from being a graphic designer with focus on digital products to being an software engineer with a deep understanding of the underlying technologies.
With expertise of over 10 years, ranging from UX-Design, to software development, DevOps, architecture, automation, coachings and workshops I help my clients to reach their business goals and lay the foundation for their digital future. I put great value upon being innovative, pragmatic and reliable at all times.
Expertise
01
Design-Thinking & UX
Starting a new project might be overwhelming at first. Using agile methods such as Design-Thinking or Event-Storming we can extract requirements with stakeholders of the project. At the end of the day we should strive to eliminate black spots and clear up misunderstandings.
02
Architecture
A good architecture is the base for what I call „technological success“. Based on expiriences gained from the past, current best-practices and defined goals of the project we form technological guidelines that allow it to scale, reduce complexity and offer performance as good as on the first day.
03
Development
Another big passion of my work revolves around development of software of all sorts. In my day to day work I strive to deliver code that is losely coupled, tested as well as easy to read and understand. I do not restrict myself on one either OOP or FP, instead I choose and evaluate based on the context and problem we are facing.
04
Infrastructure
I am a firm believer in the DevOps mentality in which the developer should understand the infrastructure that is backing their service and work closely with specialists taking care of databases or message brokers. I love to code my infrastructure with tools such as Terraform or pulumi and support the cloud-native movement. Did I mention that I love kubernetes?!
05
Monitoring
With a background in graphic design, I care for constant improvement and usability. I believe that each developer should closely monitor their services. Not only to avoid that a service is not performant or even completely down, but also to properly measure the success rate of newly introduced features based on real numbers and not estimates or gut feelings.
06
Workshop & Coaching
I love to share knowledge and coach open minded people. There is no greater feeling than seeing a person being happy solving a problem that they once struggled with! I regularly provide workshops to clients at the end of a project to hand it over to an internal team or engineer.
Technology
I am always eager to learn new technologies, my stack of coice revolves around widely used tools and technologies to guarantee stability and ongoing development to meet the fast paced nature of the tech industry. In case you are interested, you can find a short excerpt of technologies below.
Clients
A big thanks to all the wonderful people and organizations that I had the chance to work with over the recent years! ❤️
Serverless, DevOps-Engineering & Architecture for TUI
From mid 2022 onwards I was contracted to support and organize the refactoring of a large scale API which drives the mobile apps of TUI to replace an aging, error prone and slow performing service. To avoid ending up in the same situation as the previous service and with the capabilities of the team in mind, I proposed an architecture draft which consisted of a fully serverless REST API with best practices regarding performance, scalability, failure resilience and monitoring kept in mind.
The project consisted of analyzing existing code, providing a rollout plan, coaching employees in regards to code readability, maintainability, monitoring best practices and of course driving the implementation until the go live. Additionally this project was the first proof of concept to integrate and promote the usage of DataDog for TUI as their primary monitoring, tracing and alerting solution. The team is now self sufficient and works API-Design driven, managing multiple API-Contracts towards consumers and working with one of the first fully serverless projects at TUI.
At the start of 2023 we successfully launched the API which lead to a drastic reduction of failures by over 800% as well as improved performance from a median 2,2s towards 0,8s overall. These improvements lay the long-term future for the biggest sales region of TUI and their associated mobile apps, with happier customers approaching completed bookings.
GraphQL, DevOps & Architecture for RTL+
In late 2021 I started to support a newly founded team to organize and architect the rollout of an API which was the backbone to a huge shift in the business model of RTL. We inherited a MVP MVC GraphQL API built in a monolithic fashion and right from the start it was quite clear that this will not be sufficient to meet the businesses needs for a multi-purpose and -team organizational shift.
We pitched the idea of Apollo-Federation - A new way to compose multiple smaller GraphQL APIs into a fully functional Graph / API. This architectural decision was important to allow for a independent and fast paced development of the product while still providing the benefits of a graph based API to our consumers. During the project we set standards in terms of schema design, best practices as well as provided closed source libraries within the company which allowed the teams to start fast and focus on their actual implementation and not waste time on repititive work.
These libraries contained monitoring best practices such as distributed tracing, metrics, standardized error handling and default behavior for all APIs to make the day to day work of the teams a little bit easier. Finally, we rolled out a package which provided a basic, but configurable, Infrastructure preset using Terraform CDK which allowed more developers to take on service creation without much knowledge regarding kubernetes and the underlying infrastructure.
GraphQL & TypeScript Team-Lead for ProSiebenSat1
Contracted to support a newly founded cross-functional team in the rollout of a multi-channel content management system in a leading position. My tasks in this project included managing a Node JS GraphQL API gateway, organizing deprecations, rolling out new features for the editorial team and coaching employees to fully lead the development without external supervision.
Additionally I lead the development of a Software-Development-Kit for future consumers of the CMS API which enforced API contracts and allowed for easier distributed caching with an event-driven invalidation kept in mind for the near future. In early 2021 we successfully launched the product on the german market on a well known TV brand leading the way for the bigger ones such as ProSieben or Sat1 to come. Comparing it to the old system we reduced the memory usage by ~20%, improved stability by reducing failures to a hundreth as well as reduced a great amount of complexity for new developers.
This was a big step towards the overall goal of deprecating the old, slow moving monolith and allow the group to move and improve in a speed required in the fast-paced media/TV industry.
Fashion-Connect store platform for BonPrix
In early 2019 I was contacted by the founder of OpenFormation GmbH, André König, to accompany him in a major refactoring of the Fashion-Connect store backend. The system backs the digital store concept, merging the best of online and offline expiriences, that delivers a new way of retail-shopping to all customers.
It integrates with IOT devices & sensors, internal warehouse management and order systems as well as additional third party systems for the payment and staff. It handles complex store automation flows within all the while offering BFF APIs for mobile apps for both customers and employees of each store. We took over the previous monolith and refactored it into small, event-driven, testable and independent services.
The system is now scalable as we built it on "Cloud-Native" principles and technologies from the ground up. Another big success metric for us was to reduce the error rate of the system which we could reduce by 150% which led to an increase in sales overall.
Micro-Frontend Architecture for Immowelt
In early 2018 Immowelt contracted me to accompany a dedicated team in a major technical overhaul towards a white label search for properties. I was tasked to architect, guide and implement the best practices which drive the company and it's developers in a transition to a micro-frontend architecture.
During this process, we open sourced a lot of the tooling and best practices under the companies GitHub organization to attract and support other developers facing the same problems. After the technical foundation was laid and the dedicated team was confident with the new tech-stack, workshops where held with 6 cross-functional teams with the goal of onboarding everybody to the new technological foundation as well as introducing most of the expirienced backend developers to some of the frontend tools and libraries. I regularly synced with team members and success metrics have been met.
The median time-to-market for features was reduced by 50%, page speed metrics have been improved by 50% (excluding ads). Apart from this the new architecture allows for easier onboarding of new developers, which is always great to hear.
eCommerce travel platform for GoCruise.com
In 2016 I got contracted by GoCruise to lead their B2C development team. As a rapidly evolving startup my tasks ranged from managing the project, creating a feasibly UX for the customer as well as implementing services to back the B2C platform together with a handful of junior engineers.
Together we managed to meet tight deadlines, overcome technical hurdles and provide a platform which was loved by users and business alike. We managed to create a sales funnel which 94% of users completed up until the payment. The customer facing web app was built on top of React backed by high performant Node JS backend services which where built to manage thousands of requests per second on a constrained cloud infrastructure with just a few computing nodes.
To achieve this, a data driven rendering pipeline was introduced with a mid-term goal of making it fully event-driven backed by a Pub/Sub system. Apart from the customer facing PWA, another focus was to build a headless CMS for the sales and content team which connected throughout the microservices and automatically created page entities whenever a primary enitity was imported and activated.
Node.js & TypeScript consultancy for Zalando
I was contacted by Zalando to fill in as a lead for one of their frontend microservices. The task was to implement new features based on observed KPIs as well as refactoring the current service into a high performaning and standard compatible Node JS backend, written in TypeScript, to handle and serve the React application within the microservice cosmos of Zalando.
Apart from development I ensured to support the hiring process, onboard new people and finally did workshops for all team members to transfer knowledge that wasn't already transfered via peer-reviews.