About
French name, German accent.
I'm a Platform/Backend Engineer with 20+ years of experience, from Bonn, Germany.
I build elvah during the day and Open Source Software at night.
Work Experience
Charging EVs (Electric Vehicles) is a mess. There are not enough charging stations to cater to the growing number of EV drivers and not all of them work reliably, are comfortable to use, on public ground, and so on.
At elvah, we want to excite sustainable mobility and make EV Charging as smooth as possible - especially to newcomers. We do this by analyzing charging sessions, metadata and customer feedbacks so that we can recommend the best charging stations, based on reliability, ease of use, comfort, and more.
kreait (now elvah) was founded by a small group of freelancers as a development and digital strategy agency with renowned clients in Media-, Sports- and Publishing industries.
Over the years we had grown to a team of almost 30, but (like many others) lost most of our clients to the COVID-19 pandemic. We saw this as a chance to pivot from an agency serving others to a product company, following our joint wish to contribute to a more sustainable future - and so, kreait became elvah.
The clients I worked for are listed in the "Projects" section.
Mostly backend development for multiple clients in the Cologne area, including Deutsche Telekom and RTL.
Custom Lotus Notes applications for clients in the banking sector.
Projects
Conception and implementation of a web-based, anonymous COVID-19 contact tracing app
Service Architecture Concepts, REST API Design, Data Import and Enrichments, Infrastructure as Code
Infrastructure Assessments, CI/CD implementation, Service Administration, Team Support, and Coaching
(until 2019)
CMS Development, CodeBase refactorings, Quality Assurance, Team Support
Team support and backend development for the physical production pipeline.
(until 2017)
Team Consulting, Data Imports, Data Enrichment, CMS Development
(until 2016)
API Development, Data Enrichment, and CMS Development
(until 2014)
Ampya was a music video platform where I mainly worked on its CMS and the metadata enrichment of ~30M tracks, 60K videos, and their associated artist profiles.
Realization of a showcase website for the (then) new Tolino eReader.
(until 2013)
Website relaunches and CMS development on Condé Nast's Geman flagship magazines (Glamour, Vogue, GQ, Myself), in close collaboration with internal and external developers as well as the editorial team.
(until 2009)
Clipfish was a Video Portal for User-generated content and clips from popular TV Shows on the RTL TV Broadcaster.
I joined the project to support the upcoming relaunch and stayed for feature development and system operations.
Side Projects
Various Open Source projects and libraries
Various Open Source projects and libraries
During a hackathon in 2013, the team wanted to explore Firebase (it didn't belong to Google back then). As my role was to provide the project's backend, and Firebase didn't have a PHP SDK, I created some functions to interact with their REST API. The hackathon ended, I open-sourced my code and worked on it ever since. Today (April '23), the SDK is downloaded 460,000 times a month and I expect the numbers to grow - as long as Firebase doesn't release its own PHP SDK or buys mine 😅