About Me
Hey there! I'm Ham, a pretty regular dude enjoying life in rural Germany. I build software for a living, including all the messy stuff that comes with it. Currently I work remotely for Gigs, where we build the world's first telecom-as-a-service platform.
I love playing Doppelkopf with my friends, roaming the countryside with my wife and our dog Lenny, enjoying the good things in life, and rewatching episodes from the golden era of The Simpsons.
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.
Work history, in brief
- GigsSoftware Developer 2024 – present
- Stack OverflowPrincipal Software Engineer 2019 – 2024
- ThoughtworksSoftware Developer & Lead Consultant 2014 – 2019
- Arvato Services (Bertelsmann)Software Developer, Software Architect 2012 – 2014
- BertelsmannSoftware Developer (working student) 2008 – 2012
If you want to work with me in any way, you'll find my contact details at the bottom of this page.
Don't be shy. Reach out and say "hi"!
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:
Free time funsies
- π² Roaming the woods with my dog and my wife
- ποΈββοΈ Lifting heavy stuff and putting it back down in my garage gym
- β£οΈ Playing Doppelkopf at the pub
- πΈ Listening to crappy punk rock
- π₯ Having barbecue with friends
- π§° restoring my 1956 NSU Quickly two-stroke moped
- πΆβπ«οΈ curing and cold-smoking home-made ham
- π΄ taking a nap with my dog
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!