/whoami

Hi there! My name is Christian 👋

I am a:

• Dad of Twins
• Husband
• Can opener for two Coonies
• Full Stack Developer
• Gaming Geek
• Coffee addict
• Part time Lunatic
• Survivor of the browser wars

What keeps my mind wandering:

• Working on this personal 11ty Blog while learning how this Jamstack thingy works
• Learning lots of (Web) technology I challenged myself with
• Writing content for my travel blog
• Stupid idea of trying out a pod/vidcast about my workinglife experiences so far
• Not thriving in Chaos
• Looking forward to collaborate with web developers, gamers, content creators... Short: all you awesome people!
• Goals 2021: Find a new professional challenge

Knowledge in (but not only):

The present

On a professional level I am a Full Stack Developer who is passionate about all things Web, Agile and Clean Code. I am also deeply interested in Software Architecture and Automation.

Currently I am working as a PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) Developer for an international company providing industrial automation and sensor solutions. Here I enhance and modify the used PLM software manufactored by Aras. Basically PLM Developer is here just another wording for a Full Stack Developer.

For me this is quite challenging, since I not only switched to a completely new industrial area but also switched the tech stack from the Java/JSP, JavaScript stack to C#, JavaScript and the Aras internal ALM.

Meanwhile I try to support my team with my vast experience in agile work, web development and test automation.

The intermediate

While changing gears, I challenged myself to get more involved into the backend and component oriented world and thus attended trainings for React and PHP and even certified as PHP Developer.

In the end I didn't take the PHP path but took the opportunity to challenge myself even more: I completely switched the business field I was working in from digital publishing to industrial automation and sensor solutions. Totally stoked how this will turn out.

The past

On my last project I was working on heavy CMS/DMS systems writen in Java (a.k.a. Liferay) with a more conservative approach to Frontend architecture. Heavily reliant on Bootstrap and JSP/Velocity migrating to Freemarker Templates and an own theme. Still bound to the platform itself, I questioned my approach to Frontend Architecture. The result of this process can be found in the mini-series about Frontend Architecture in the blog.

Before I was Frontend Lead and Mentor for a multi-national team, responsible for the overall architecture of the Frontend of the main platform of a big german digital publisher.
In the beginning I also introduced Selenium as E2E test toolchain, which was then taken and improved by the dedicated test team of the time and was part of the devops team, beginning to automate tests and deployments to an external hoster. Nowadays you would call this CI/CS.

I was also heavily involved in the agile process, even took over the Scrum Master tasks as substitute for a short time. Since we where a distributed team, Scrum frameworks like LeSS had all its own challenge because all say you need to be co-located, which the team at this time didn't want. And as a empowered team, it was our own decision then. What I really liked where the Communities of Practice which evolved in that time. Lots of knowledge and information share happened there.