About
I advise the way I would want to be advised when it was my company.
For most of my career the software I built was my own responsibility: as a co-founder, the architecture, the product and the invoice were all mine. That is the view I bring to other people’s products now.
How I got here
I have been a software engineer since 2010, trained the German way with an apprenticeship and then five years in client projects, which taught me early to talk with customers rather than about them. In 2015 I co-founded TeamGrid, a project planning product for agencies, and led its engineering from the first architecture to years of daily use. In 2021 I co-founded VineForecast, farm management and disease forecasting for winegrowers, and was responsible for architecture, infrastructure and most of the implementation in a small team.
In both companies I had a hand in the product and the interface, not only the code. That is where the habit comes from of asking what a feature is for before asking how to build it, and of saying no to things that do not deserve to exist yet.
Along the way I have hired and led developers, modernised a stack in production without customers noticing, moved infrastructure onto our own cluster, coached founding teams in a life-science accelerator, and sat on the technical side of investor conversations. Now I do that for other companies, as a consultant rather than an employee.
How I work
Honest before polite
If I think a plan will not work, you hear it in the first call, not in the final report. If I cannot help, I say that too.
Decisions, written down
Every engagement ends in a document that says what was decided and why. Not a deck, a document the team can argue with a year later.
Independent of what gets built
I do not run an agency and I do not earn more when you build more. Buying a tool is often the right answer, and I will say so.
Inside the team, not above it
I talk to your developers directly, work in your tools, and treat their view of the weak spots as the most reliable data there is.
Automate what repeats
Anything a person does twice by hand gets a script, a pipeline or a workflow. In my own work and in yours.
In short
- Based
- Bovenden near Göttingen, Germany. Remote across Europe, in person around Göttingen and for kick-offs elsewhere.
- Languages
- German and English, both fluent in a meeting and in a code review.
- Tools I reach for
- TypeScript, React and React Native, Node.js, PostgreSQL, Docker and Kubernetes. Comfortable in adjacent stacks when the job needs it.
- Outside client work
- I maintain SignalDB, an open-source database for reactive apps, and build a few products of my own. They are on the references page, because they show how I work when the brief is mine.
Want to talk?
A first call is half an hour and costs nothing but the time. Tell me where your product stands.