Hi, I’m Max Nowack. I work freelance with startups and product teams. Most of the time that means technical direction, architecture work, and building the parts nobody else wants to take on. My work usually sits around local-first systems, realtime collaboration, and software that stays practical in everyday use.
I work on my own and usually join a team that already exists. The work tends to fall into one of these three.
For teams that need someone responsible for the technical side without hiring full time. I make the architecture calls, handle the build-or-buy questions, and take on the decisions that keep getting pushed to the next sprint. I also set how code gets reviewed.
A fixed scope with a written report at the end. I read the code, talk to the people working in it, and write down what holds up, what is going to break, and what fixing it costs. Usually before an investment, an acquisition, or a decision to rebuild.
When a team is stuck on something specific, I build it with them. Usually the parts everything else depends on: data model, sync, offline behaviour, performance.
CatchFlights turns the aircraft actually flying over you into something you can collect. A radar shows live traffic around your location, and catching a contact adds its type, registration, airline, airport, and route to a personal collection, with XP, levels, streaks, and curated sets on top.
It started as an attempt to make plane spotting feel like a game without giving up the real data behind it. I build it end to end: the mobile app, the backend that decides what an aircraft is worth, and a self-hosted flight data service that turns raw ADS-B traces into aircraft facts and routes.
SignalDB grew out of practical problems I ran into building offline-first products. I wanted a lean, offline-capable layer for working with data in the UI, with a simpler developer experience than the existing options and enough flexibility for different persistence and sync strategies.
VineForecast is a farm management and disease forecasting platform used in vineyards throughout the season. I joined the founding team early on and focused on the frontend architecture, mobile apps, and offline support.
The app helps winegrowers bring field work into digital processes and make data-driven decisions around vine health and grape quality.
LUMODO came out of an interdisciplinary collaboration between industrial design, engineering, and software. We built programmable lights with addressable LEDs, realtime control, and a small web app for direct interaction.
A central technical part was mapping 2D video content onto the lights in 3D space. We also built a large-scale installation that many people visited and that stayed with everyone involved.
TeamGrid started as an attempt to make project planning feel more direct and collaborative instead of form-heavy. We spent a lot of time on drag-and-drop planning, realtime collaboration, and workflow automation.
For most of the time I led development and built the product across the stack, including features like telephony-based time tracking and a fully automatic scheduling system.
Email is usually the easiest way to reach me.
