I am a Berlin based freelance full-stack developer and consultant who has been building web applications for over 20 years.

While working for a wide variety of companies including small and large startups, software agencies, international media companies I gained experience and solid skills both on the front-end and back-end side of the web. I am also passionate about user experience and accessibility.

Check out my portfolio to learn more about the companies and projects I worked for.

My philosophy

My leading principle is getting things done but only those “things” that have a purpose and create value for my employer or client.

• I find discussing plans on paper or whiteboard and giving feedback in different means of code review useful
• I also believe in no-blame engineering culture and have learned from my own mistakes through a postmortem process
• I enjoy teaching and mentoring, have held several internal trainings and a few public tech talks with positive feedback. I believe knowledge transfer is important in software engineering

Front-end skills

I prefer to use recent and popular tools on new projects which currently means one of the reactive frameworks like Vue.js or React. I am also comfortable working on legacy codebases predating these (for example Backbone or in-house frameworks).

I am quick to learn and adopt new technologies but I am particularly strong in these technologies and skills:

• Modern, semantic HTML
• Recent JavaScript (ECMAScript 6 and newer) and TypeScript
• Modern CSS
• Reactive frameworks (Vue.js + Vuex, React + Redux and others)
• User interfaces from scratch or using component libraries and design systems
• Usability and accessibility
• Data visualization (D3.js, interactive SVG grahpics)
• Development tooling (using Node.js and the NPM ecosystem)
• Electron desktop applications
• Basic image processing

Back-end skills

My toolkit includes multiple back-end languages and the experience spans across large monolithic systems like Rails monoliths, enterprise Java (J2EE) applications and microservices written from scratch. These are my strengths:

• Programming in Scala, Java, Ruby, Python or Node.js
• Using frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Django, Spring Boot
• Thorough understanding of how to manage concurrency on different platforms and frameworks
• Serverless architecture (AWS Lambda, Serverless Framework)
• A variety of SQL and NoSQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Cassandra, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, DynamoDB)
• Building and scaling distributed systems
• Building services backed by asynchronous messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
• Integrating big data solutions like Hadoop and know how to write MapReduce jobs

DevOps skills

I have been involved in deploying and operating software in production since early on in my career and started exploring the depths of the Linux operating system even before I became a software engineer. These are the methods and technologies I have first-hand experience with:

• Writing containerized applications with Docker
• Running applications on OpenShift or Kubernetes
• Deploying applications to cloud infrastructure (Amazon AWS, EC2, Heroku, DigitalOcean)
• Managing infrastructure configuration as code (Chef, Ansible, CloudFormation, Terraform)
• Continuous delivery on several platforms (Jenkins, GoCD, CircleCI, Travis, AWS CodeBuild, AppVeyor, GitLab, GitHub Actions)
• Monitoring infrastructure and code performance (Prometheus, Nagios, New Relic, Sentry)
• Setting up alerts and responding to incidents while being on-call

Other skills

Besides the main areas above I possess a couple of other hard and soft skills:

• Able to efficiently work with visual designers on building user interfaces
• Participated in various project management flows from waterfall to agile, often taken facilitator roles
• Managing a small team of developers
• Using UNIX-like operating systems and automating recurring tasks using shell scripts
• Good knowledge of how networking and the internet works. I understand the challenges of scaling software across physical locations
• Maintainer of a few open-source projects. I also make small contributions to software I use (bug reports and fixes)
• Engineer recruiting, interviewing candidates, reviewing profiles or code challenges

How to hire me

If the skills I can offer sound like useful additions to your existing team or want to me to help with starting a project from scratch please send an email contact me through the channels below. The conversation usually starts with an initial free one-hour consultation over a phone or video call.

I am happy to work on-site in central Berlin, occasionally show up at more distant destinations or work fully remote anywhere else.