I find it absolutely fascinating to see the projects that I have done after a few years, and think how they were done and how I would do them differently now. This list serves as my development log to me and anyone interested is welcome to read where I have been.
2017 to Now - Caruso
AngularJS, Typescript, RxJS, RxDB
In 2017 I started at an automotive start-up, Caruso. The company itself was also founded in 2017 and what they offered me was a vision & goal that was a lot easier to grasp than at Arago. I was hired to implement the caruso marketplace. An online B2B marketplace where companies from the automotive sector would find each other and buy and sell mobility data.
What I have learned from Caruso is not so much the technical skill to build online apps, but rather the skill to deal with the uncertainty and cooperation among colleagues. And this is also reflected in my daily work which has transitioned from mostly coding to 50 / 50 between coding and organising and managing. It is quite a different kind of challenge and I find this shift quite refreshing.
Roles I have played:
- Implementation of the Caruso Marketplace
- Concept and implementation of the Catalog Manager
- Concept and PM for the 3 month student project for Caruso Develop Portal
- Mentoring colleagues
- Multiple smaller side-projects: Stage Setup tooling, Marketplace Vision
- Interviewing
- Met partners for feedback
We have celebrated many parties and successes with Caruso and as we move forward I expect there to be more.
2016 to 2017 - arago
AngularJS, ReactJS, Redux
I was hired by arago, one of the leading AI companies in Germany, to be part of a new team, that will develop applications for the arago HIRO software. HIRO is a process automation software. At the time of writing this the main focus is automating IT systems of large IT providers and banks, but ultimately the goal is to establish HIRO as a general AI that is able to preform all mundane tasks inside the enterprise.
Our team successfully shipped HIRO Portal, the license management and performance monitoring portal for HIRO. I was tasked with the UI implementation of the Portal. Due to historical and at that time practical reasons I decided to use AngularJS that was already slowly aging, but rest of our libraries used that. Luckily the concept was not technically difficult, there was a lot more challenge in the getting things right from the content and interaction part.
After the success of HIRO Portal we were renamed into to the HIRO UI team and got tasked with redefining the main HIRO UI. This came with a lot of new challenges, but also increased manpower by an experienced outsourcing team from Belarus. We had to work out the new concept for the UI and also decide on the implementation details. For this project ReactJS was used instead as other teams were also pushing for it, and thus React would be used company wide.
Leaving my team at Arago and Frankfurt in general was difficult for me. I left behind some very good friends.
2016 - Msc. Computer Science from the RWTH Aachen
After a small delay caused by my master thesis, I received my degree in early 2016, after 5 and a half years. Looking back it wasn’t always exciting for me and there was a lot of grit required at times, but in the end I think it has built me into a better developer. It gave me deep technical knowledge and it thought me to be independent and that a good work ethic solves nearly all of the difficulties in life.
What is great about university is that you are always up-to-date with the newest technologies. There are so many smart people around and since the projects usually carry a lesser weight then it is so convenient to try out the latest library or framework. This is something that it a lot harder to do in established projects that run for a lot longer than a few months.
2015 - Oculavis Share
Android, WebRTC, AR, node.js, canvas.js, jQuery
Oculavis Share is definitely the most challenging project that I have taken part in. It was done as part of my Msc Thesis at the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Technology. The scope of the project was very ambitious, we started from a scratch and we wanted to have a working video chat from smart glasses to the browser with AR support and a wrist band to function as a mouse. I had to figure out the technical realization, for many parts where I had limited to no knowledge, e.g. Android, AR and the Myo Wristband API.
Until the end I had the feeling that the project is still in alpha, but it was enough to raise investor interest and serve as a prototype to what eventually become Oculavis Share. A product in the start-up that Martin my supervisor, and 2 others created during my stay at Fraunhofer. I left the project after 10 months, to join the AI start-up, Arago, instead.
2015 - ambiHome webpage & home control system
AngularJS, jQuery, perf. optimizations, mobile design
ambiHome hired me to assist the existing developers to refine the existing UI for the home automation control system. The main task was to make the UI mobile friendly. This included UI changes as well as increasing the system performance and rendering times, as the old system could not load the UI. It was a great opportunity to refactor the existing AngularJS code into the component architecture, that emerged around that time and as history shows this trend was here to stay. You can see a marketing screenshot of the home control UI in the picture below.
Concurrently to the home control system, ambiHome was in the progress of overhauling the company homepage. I teamed up with truly a very hard working designer, Marie, to create the new homepage. We only had a few months of time, but the result turned out to be excellent. The page is lightweight, responsive, with internationalization and google analytics.
2014 - Requirements Bazaar
AngularJS, Polymer 0.x, Java, MySQL
In 2014 István Koren approached me with a new project. They required a frontend developer for a project management portal, Requirements Bazaar. The concept is similar to JIRA, but aims to be less complicated and meant to promote communication between the developers and the users. At the time of the writing, the project is still being developed and is freely accessible, so check it out and maybe it is something you are looking for for your group.
The project was technically challenging as István had an idea to combine Polymer components with AngularJS. Back then Polymer was still in alpha and it was unclear if combining the two offers any benefit. In retrospect using both did not give us a huge boost, however the project got us the attention of the Google developers group in Brussel. As they were interested in out experience and we were invited to give a talk there to present our approach.
2013 - NOSE Navigation Dashboard
Dojo Toolkit, jQuery, yFiles, Java, Rapidminer, MySQL, Neo4j
Was my Bachelor thesis that I finished under the guidance of Ph.D Anna Hannemann. The project was meant to raise awareness inside OSS communities to the members who participate in the development. We mined the community board, and email lists, to build community overview. The developers were then encouraged to check out the visulisation and connections between them. As I was coding alone I had to implement the backend and the UI for the dashboard.
The project was well received. Not only grade wise, but also gathered some interest from outside our institute, bytesizebio. So it got funding from the LAYERS project and I could continue developing the tools and the dashboard for another half a year. During this time we focused on integrating the dashboard into the layers portal and database management. We released a conference paper describing our findings next year & held presentations at the LAYERS meet-ups.
The project is no longer maintained nor online, but I found an older picture.
2012 - The Semester Planner
jQuery, JSF
The Semester Planner was the project where I started coding more and sparked the interest in web development. It was meant to help students plan their Terms at the University and encourage them to follow it. The Semester Planner started off as a 5 man 6 month project, but was later extended and given funding from the University Research fund, with the idea of integrating it to the Campus Portal. During the project I met 2 charismatic and experienced developers, Nick and Ahmet, got me up to speed with HTML/CSS and the JSF backend.
2010 - Moved to Germany to study CS at the RWTH Aachen
After finishing high school I moved to Germany to study at the RWTH Aachen University. RWTH is the largest technical University in Germany and is ranked in the top 50 in natural sciences in the world. The transition was not easy, but allowed me to scope my abilities better.