Hermann “Ham” Vocke

Email Website Code Email: ham@hamvocke.com Web: https://hamvocke.com

Experienced software developer, technical leader, engineering manager, architect, consultant, and mentor. Fosters healthy teams with an empathetic leadership style and brings equal amounts of technical proficiency, leadership expertise, and business acumen. Strongly believes in Continuous Delivery, shipping small things frequently, getting feedback fast and iterating on it.

Work Experience

Gigs Remote, Germany

  1. Ruby
  2. Go
  3. GCP
  4. MySQL
  5. Microservices
  6. API design
  7. Test-Driven Development
  8. Continuous Delivery

Engineering Manager Aug 2024 - present

Leading an engineering team in charge of building Gigs’ public-facing API and the core subscription management processes in their backend system. Growing our engineering organization by planning future team growth and interviewing candidates. Fostering a healthy engineering culture by setting up well-defined on-call procedures, architecture roadmap planning, and shaping platform engineering teams.

Stack Overflow Remote, Germany

  1. C#
  2. ASP.NET Core
  3. TypeScript
  4. SQL Server
  5. Azure
  6. Elasticsearch
  7. Redis
  8. Modular Monoliths
  9. Legacy Modernization

Principal Software Engineer Apr 2023 - Aug 2024

Driving the modernization of our legacy system and architecture by enabling and encouraging engineering teams to adopt new development practices and providing guidance around our architectural direction. Establishing a shared technical vision. Mentoring engineering leads. Collaborating with the CTO on strategic initiatives. Researching technology and architecture options for modernization initiatives across the engineering organization. Leading the architecture guild.

Staff Software Engineer Feb 2022 - Apr 2023

Building Stack Overflow for Teams. Technical lead for a product engineering team. Focused on providing a healthy, sustainable, effective and high-trust engineering environment. Providing a technical vision for the team. Helping to ship new features by pairing with product managers, guiding architecture, providing and supporting technical design, hands-on implementation and monitoring our systems in production. Shaping the architectural direction of our system to enable organisational growth, allow for safe experimentation and evolution, and make a huge monolithic codebase easier to work with.

Software Engineer Apr 2019 - Feb 2022

Building Stack Overflow for Teams — a private, hosted instance of Stack Overflow’s Q&A platform. Notable achievements:

Thoughtworks Hamburg, Germany

  1. Java
  2. Spring Boot
  3. Swift
  4. Javascript
  5. node.js
  6. MySQL
  7. MongoDB
  8. AWS
  9. Azure
  10. Terraform
  11. Continuous Delivery
  12. Test-Driven Development
  13. Microservices

Lead Software Developer May 2018 - Mar 2019

Technical lead for teams. Hands-on design and implementation of high-traffic microservice systems. Coaching and mentoring teams to adopt agile practices, continuous delivery, pair programming, and cloud infrastructure. Running workshops and trainings about software architeture, API design, and Continuous Delivery for various clients.

Senior Software Developer Sep 2014 - May 2018

Software development, consulting, and coaching for different clients. Living and teaching agile methodologies, pair programming, continuous delivery, test automation, DevOps and TDD. Building microservices, cloud infrastructure, IoT ecosystems, mobile apps and backend systems.

Arvato Services Gütersloh, Germany

  1. Java
  2. Oracle
  3. EJB
  4. Swing
  5. JUnit
  6. Desktop Application Development
  7. Web Development

Software Architect Sep 2012 - Aug 2014

Software Developer Feb 2012 - Sep 2012

Bertelsmann Gütersloh, Germany

Software Developer (working student) Aug 2008 - Jan 2012

Education

University of Münster

Master in Information Management (MIM), Information Management 2012 - 2014

Fachhochschule der Wirtschaft Paderborn

Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.), Wirtschaftsinformatik 2010 - 2012

b.i.b. International College, Paderborn

Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung 2008 - 2010

Languages