I was born in Munich, Germany, 1982. The same year that TIME magazine crowned the computer “machine of the year”. So, arguably, I’ve been around since the dawn of the computer age.
In spite of this substantial foreshadowing, I wasn’t focused on an IT career early on. During high school, I was mostly interested in history and Latin. This love for antiquity has stayed with me. Luckily for most people, it now only tends to show itself in the occasional unnecessary latin quote and a tendency to pepper conversations with “interesting” historical trivia. Also, Gladiator is still one of my favorite movies of all times.
In my first round of tertiary education 1 I went on to study Japanese studies, economics and philosophy at Munich’s Ludwig-Maximilians Universität. To my surprise, I later on discovered that job opportunities in this sector where rather scarce. During a moderately 2 successful attempt to start a freelancing career I, serendipitously, got into programming. And, since it seemed to be not the worst idea, I eventually decided to become an honest man and study computer science.
After a stretch of highly unhealthy coffee consumption and a pretty random sleep schedule, I was awarded with a Bachelor’s in computer science at Fernuniversität Hagen, Germany, in 2017 and with an M.Sc. Informatics at Technische Universität München, Germany, in 2020. Both in my Bachelor’s as well as my Master’s degree, I focused on topics that have the ancillary benefit of also providing robust training in the greek alphabet. First knowledge-based systems and later formal verification. Up to that point, I didn’t even know that the letter ξ existed. And much less how to spell it. So, definitely worth it. I also discovered my love for functional programming during that time.
Even though working on some arcane project for a couple of years with little to no pay seemed enticing, I decided against following up with a doctor’s degree.
In my first stint as a software developer I was lucky to receive the opportunity for an internship at IBM Deutschland GmbH in the high stakes field of automated Informix database log analysis. Upon receiving my Bachelor’s degree shortly thereafter and continuing with the Master’s, I started working at MaibornWolff GmbH in June 2017. To my surprise, I have managed to stay employed there until now.
I started out as a working student in web development parallel and later, from 2020 to now, continued as a full time software engineer. In my time at MaibornWolff, I was—and I am contractually obliged to say this 3—fortunate to be able to collect a lot of experience in large and challenging IT projects for clients in the automotive, e-mobility services, household appliances, and online tourism industries.
As building castles in the air had always been one of my passions, I was also lucky to be able to gradually shift my focus to cloud-native development, cloud platform engineering, and DevOps in the last couple of years.
More about my work experience.
I’m very interested in the cloud and Kubernetes ecosystems and try to keep up with the state of the art in cloud and Kubernetes tools and technologies.
Having passed multiple Linux Foundation/Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), Microsoft Azure, as well as Amazon Web Services (AWS) exams, I wield the vast power of certification.
In doing so, I have, moreover, acquired the kind of unique grit that comes from challenging and defeating the ill-engineered online exam platforms of three different cloud certification entitites.
Since 2015, I’ve also been trying to continuously make time for volunteering work. I was active as a volunteer in the Syrian and Ukraine refugee crises. Currently, I’m helping out as a food donation collector for the charity organization Münchner Tafel e.V.
The latter job mostly consists of moving foods boxes from one place to another. In addition to being a proper back workout, this work also has the side benefit of serving as a decent indicator whether working in IT for an extended amount of time has impaired my ability to do honest work.
A short overview of my volunteering activities.