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.
SimpleSampler turns any sound into an instrument. You record a clap, a note or your voice, the app works out which note it is, and hands you a keyboard that plays it across the octaves. Eight pads hold samples for beats, and a loop station layers what you play into a song you can record and share.
The point is the short path from a sound to something you can play. A take starts with the first sound instead of the button press, the pitch is detected on the recording itself, and higher notes keep the length of the original instead of speeding up like tape. Everything stays on the device: no account, no backend, no tracking.
DevTalks plays developer conference talks the way a TV channel does. You open it and join whatever is running, at the same second as everyone else on that channel, instead of picking something off a list first.
There is no backend and no scheduler. What is on air is a pure function of an ordered list of talks, a fixed epoch, and the current time, so the site stays static and every browser works out the same position on its own. Channels are selections over the catalogue by language and topic, not playlists.
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.
