Hermann “Ham” Vocke

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

Experienced software developer, technical lead, 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.

Work Experience

Stack Overflow Remote, Germany

Principal Software Engineer Apr 2023 - present

Driving the modernization of our legacy system and architecture by enabling and encouraging teams to adopt new development practices and providing guidance around our architectural direction. Establishing a shared technical vision. Growing 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. Helping our engineering teams to become high performing teams by fostering local team autonomy, small and frequent deployments, fast feedback loops, and a culture built on trust and openness.

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 feel smaller and easier to contribute to.

Championing Continuous Delivery by pushing for shipping small things sooner and getting feedback early, improving test automation and building out new automated testing capabilities.

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

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

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

Skills

  1. Software Engineering
  2. Software Architecture
  3. Technical Leadership
  4. Continuous Delivery
  5. Test-Driven Development
  6. Frontend Development
  7. Backend Development
  8. Web Development
  9. Java
  10. C#
  11. JavaScript
  12. TypeScript
  13. Python
  14. HTML
  15. CSS
  16. vue.js
  17. Svelte
  18. Relational Databases
  19. NoSQL Databases
  20. Terraform
  21. Cloud Infrastructure
  22. Legacy Software Modernization

Languages