Career

I studied Informatik (roughly speaking, actually it was "IT-Systems Engineering" and "Telematik") and received the degrees of Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) from HPI in Potsdam, and Master of Engineering (M.Eng.) from TH Wildau.

After graduating with the M.Eng. degree, I started working at a small startup in Berlin, named "StackFuel". This little startup has grown over time and is no longer a small startup. I have been one of the first employees in the company and have had my hand in almost all of its technical parts. Working at a startup for several years, I got to work at or create many different aspects of its software. Some of the things I have done at StackFuel include:

  • Development

    • implementing whole new critical services from scratch
    • writing unit and integration tests
    • setting up monitoring solutions
    • setting up CI pipelines
    • developing solutions for automated checking MOOC student solutions of computer programming tasks
    • creating a concurrent backup strategy and implementing a backup system to save the company
    • containerization (docker) of various critical services
    • creating reproducible base images for data scientist stacks
    • developing a service for distribution of educational content
    • frontend development
    • developing an event tracking solution

  • Engineering

    • documentation of software, formal and informal diagrams, prose
    • modelling software architecture
    • modelling of databases

  • Devops

    • working on server deployment code (infrastructure as code approach) and reproducibility
    • deploying server infrastructure
    • deploying services on infrastructure
    • handling outages

  • Other

    • code reviews
    • developing assignments
    • developing online course content
    • reviewing applications
    • reviewing hand-ins of applicants
    • onboarding of new coworkers
    • technical support

This is what happens, when you join a technical startup as 1 of 2 engineers, 1 of the first 10 employees, and need to get cracking at whatever comes your way. When you stick around for a while. When you are a core team member building up the company. For this reason my experience is rather broad, even though this is my first job.

In a way pride myself to be a generalist. However, there is also a specialist side to me. In free time projects I gained a lot of additional experience off the job, that often allows me to make the right decisions at the job.

Over time I have seen many changes in processes at work. I have seen some projects play out over their whole life-cycles. I have seen decisions that later would be regretted and I have seen decisions, that stood the test of time.