About Me

Personal Stuff

I live together with my two daughters in the beautiful Odenwald in the small town of Birkenau located in the southern part of Hesse. I studied Business Information Technology at the University of Mannheim and graduated with a diploma (Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatiker) in 2006. Since then I have been working as a consultant, trainer, and software engineer.

I love IT. That's why I also love writing Open Source software and learn about new and emerging technologies in my spare time. When I'm not engaged in IT-related things, I enjoy working in my garden, I love to go hiking, swimming, and running, and I like learning not only programming languages but also foreign languages, such as Swedish.

You'll often find me roaming the nearby forests when I'm going on mushroom forays. Mycology is my latest hobby: learning about and gathering wild mushrooms.

Work

I work as a freelance trainer, consultant, developer. In my job as a freelance software engineer, I have the opportunity to work in a wide range of different projects with many different technologies.

I also often work with legacy code from the customer where it is my task to either modernize the code base and make it better maintainable or migrate the code to newer technologies.

These are the main technologies I'm working with most of the time:

• Java, Kotlin, SQL and PL/SQL, JavaScript
• Atlassian Tools: Jira, Confluence, Bamboo, Bitbucket
• Atlassian SDK: I also write plugins for Jira and Confluence
• IntelliJ, GitKraken
• Maven, Gradle, Git
• Jakarta EE, Spring, Spring Boot, GWT, JSF, Vaadin
• JUnit 5, Mockito
• Asciidoc

The following list provides an excerpt of the kinds of projects I worked with in the past.

• Oracle SOA web services for a customer from the chemical industry. Technologies used: Oracle DB, PL/SQL, WebLogic AS, Java EE, C# and Microsoft Silverlight on the front end, Gradle
• Modernize a legacy project: migrate from JBoss Seam to Jakarata EE, replace obsolete and partly manual Ant-based build process with a fully automated Maven build. Technologies used: Wildfly AS, PostgreSQL DB, Jakarta EE, Maven, JSF, Hibernate
• Build a modern, responsive web shop for a customer from the process automation industry. Technologies used: GWT, OData RESTful APIs for integrating an SAP back end, Spring, Maven, Hibernate
• Maintain and develop a number of custom Jira and Confluence plugins for various customers. Maintain and develop an own Confluence plugin sold on the Atlassian marketplace.
• Refactor an internal application written with Java and JavaScript for a customer from the process automation industry. Remove a lot of custom code caused by the not-invented-here-syndrome. Replace manual build process with fully automated Maven build. Technologies used: Spring Boot, Maven
• Build a web shop for a start-up company. Technologies used: JSF, JavaScript, Apache Solr
• Reimplementation of an outdated job portal based on PHP. Technologies used: Groovy, Grails, Gradle, Spring, MySQL

Trainings

I run training courses on a wide range of topics. These courses either take place at the customer's site or online in a virtual classroom.

I cover the following topics:

• Git
• Apache Maven
• Kotlin
• Effective Java
• Refactoring
• Design Patterns with Java
• Clean Code and Software Craftsmanship

In the past, I also covered the below technologies, but not any longer.

• Apache Subversion
• Atlassian Bitbucket
• Google Web Toolkit (GWT)
• Apache Tomcat
• Vaadin 7

Curriculum Vitae

Skills

Technologies I'm currently using

Technologies I used to work with

I have used the following skills and technologies in past projects or have worked with them for some time in the past. Therefore, my knowledge of these technologies is no longer up-to-date.

Spoken Languages

• German - Native speaker
• English - Highly proficient in spoken and written English
• Swedish - Good working knowledge
• French - Basic communication skills

Contact

How to get in touch with me:

• Email
• Xing
• LinkedIn
• Follow me on Twitter

You can also find me on my other profiles:

• GitHub
• StackOverflow
• Atlassian Developer Community