About Me

Work

I've been building software professionally for more than 16 years (we better forget those years where I did that unprofessionally). I care deeply about creating environments where developers can be bold, experiment, learn, have fun, and ship with confidence. If you work with me, you'll hear me talk about Continuous Delivery, XP, fast feedback, and modular architecture a lot. I like using Test-Driven Development whenever I can, but I'm not pushy about it.

Building software continues to fascinate me. Getting my hands dirty and building something that helps people out there is still the most blissful part of my job. Beyond writing software, I'm pretty decent at leading technical teams, guiding the architecture of systems small and large, mentoring other developers, and connecting people.

I'm not the world's greatest programmer. I'm a generalist with some areas of deep expertise, and I like it that way. I consider myself a well-rounded software developer, tech lead, architect, mentor, strategist, communicator, and reasonably fun guy.

At the moment, I'm a Software Developer at Gigs, where I help building out our platform for that makes becoming your own telecommunications provider a breeze. Before that I was a Principal Software Engineer at Stack Overflow, where I lead the company's efforts to modernize their legacy application, revamp their architecture, and enable teams to become more autonomous and ship with confidence. Way earlier I was a consultant at Thoughtworks where I helped teams adopt Continuous Delivery and Extreme Programming practices, modernize their software engineering approach, led technical teams, and built systems large and small.

Writing

I use this website as my own, personal, cozy corner of the web. It's a great way to stay in touch with me, as my presence on social media is rather sparse. I write infrequently, and not as much as I'd like. I mostly write about the things I know about the wide field of software development. Occasionally I write about life stuff, side projects, weird command-line tools, hobbies, books I've read, and anything else that I might want to write about. It's a random mix, and that's the beauty of having my personal website where I can do whatever I fancy.

If you want to follow what I'm publishing, consider following me on social media or subscribing to this website's RSS feed. You'll find plenty of links at the bottom of this page.

What I do for Fun

Since most of my work day revolves around computers, I try my best to stay away from them in my free time. That doesn't always work as planned, but when it does, you can usually find me doing any of the following things:

Whenever I fail to do stay away from computers I'm probably working on silly side projects, learning new languages and frameworks, hyper-optimizing weird command-line tools for questionable benefit, or keeping up with what other people are cooking out there.

Since everyone loves dogs, here's a picture of my best buddy and the number one source of chaos in my life, Lenny:

Around the Web

If you want to stalk follow me elsewhere, here's a list of profiles I maintain around the web. Some are more active than others:

• GitHub is where you'll find most of my code
• Mastodon is where I'm posting occasional updates and random thoughts
• last.fm keeps track of the music I'm listening to (the good, the bad, and the embarrassing)
• LinkedIn is where I'll act as professional as I can (which doesn't mean much)
• Xing is the same as LinkedIn, only in German
• and then there's MySpace

Reach out

If you want to say "hi", leave a comment, ask a question, or start a conversation, feel free to drop me a line via Email, or on one of the social media channels listed above.

I reply to everything that hits my inbox as long as it's genuine conversation and you're not trying to sell me shady stuff. Don't be shy!