Jun 2024 – Mar 2026 · 1 yr 9 mos · Germany

• https://github.com/neomjs/neo
• I am dedicating most of my time as an OSS developer on the neo.mjs framework.
• Neo is an multi-threading UI framework, focussed on bringing the performance of frontends to the next level. It is using persistent JSON based structures as well as a custom virtual DOM engine.

Sep 2021 – May 2024 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany · Hybrid

• I joined Christian Gerber's team as his first senior manager to help scaling up a new business unit, the Cloud Technology Studio Kaiserslautern from 8 to >100 employees in a Frontend Lead role.
• My role included working on client projects most of the time and leading multiple frontend teams there in parallel.

Jan 2018 – Aug 2021 · 3 yrs 7 mos · Munich, Bavaria, Germany · Remote

• After having spent many years working with bay area based teams and fine-tuning my skill set, I felt the strong need to "give back" and share my knowledge with the industry. Especially on a European level, where frontend development was (and still is) lacking severely behind.
• So, I accepted the challenge from the PlayStation team, and did follow up on the idea to create a next generation frontend framework from scratch.
• From a technical perspective, it has already become a masterpiece:
• OMT (off the main thread) based, leading to an unmatched performance, extensibility & scalability
• 100% based on Web Standards (the dev mode can run without transpilations), leading to a better developer productivity, since there are no side effects when debugging
• The multi-threading architecture optionally allows the creation of browser based multi window apps
• Open Source following the MIT license
• A super efficient engine for fine-grained delta DOM updates (only touching what is needed to change)
• While the framework got into the Top 5 of the open source awards program inside the category "The most exciting use of technology in 2021", I literally got zero support from the government or EU based industry.
• My heartbreaking lesson was that especially inside Germany, you can provide an excellent solution even free to use, and companies will simply ignore it on purpose. The rationale was simply an extreme focus on risks and focussing on industry "best practices", no matter how bad they might be. Leading to missing out on great opportunities to reduce development costs as well as providing better results to their users.
• This got complimented by the government, not funding innovation drivers. Even as the maintainer of one of Europe's biggest OSS projects (from an amount of commits perspective).
• After spending my private savings, a change was needed and interviews with Google & Accenture followed.

May 2017 – Dec 2019 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Remote

• Long term contractor agreement as a Frontend Architect. My role included a huge
• framework migration from Ext 3 to 6 as well as designing & implementing a new architecture to
• support lazy loading of relevant UI packages & localisation modules.

Dec 2016 – Apr 2017 · 4 mos · Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany · Hybrid

• Contractor agreement. I helped out on the project “PACO”. My role was to create a
• massive Grid-structure using Ext JS with intense calculations on the client side. I
• created a Bryntum Siesta based Unit & UI test suite which was run on 50+ laptops in
• parallel.

May 2014 – Jul 2018 · 4 yrs 2 mos · Greater Munich Metropolitan Area · Remote

• I worked very closely with the Foster City based team with Gerard Horan & Dzmitri Zhemchuhou on the PDCat project. This is a system to manage the global game development. Game studios, franchise partners, legal teams and the Sony management are connected.
• I guided the project from its very early inception phase to the final production release (GA) for over 4 years via a long term contractor agreement.
• My focus was purely on the frontend side: designing the package based architecture, supporting lazy loading of modules & real-time updates via WebSockets, but also implementing massive parts of the frontend code base on my own.
• The, at that point in time, next generation user interface was built on top of Ext JS 6. The Application fully exploited EXT JS 6 Classic capabilities, which I enhanced severely, and made extensive use of the Ext Direct API.
• While we were already very advanced in the development cycle, it became more and more clear that Sencha would not work out as a company and Ext JS would become a dead end. I got tasked to review the Angular & React Core to figure out, if one of them could be a viable option for a future migration.
• Sadly, the results were devastating, and in a way I got pushed into creating a new frontend framework from scratch, which resolves the pitfalls of the currently available options.

Oct 2013 – Mar 2014 · 5 mos

• Having the reputation of being inside the top 20 of ExtJS developers, I joined Sencha at its peak as the first full-time employee from Germany.
• The main investor (and board member) Sequoia Capital insisted on the company being product driven, to achieve a potentially higher share value for the planned IPO (which did not happen). Meaning: 80% of the revenue had to come through licenses and the trainings, support and services team combined were capped at 20%.
• While there were 5000 clients at this time, the services team led by Hyle Campbell & Bonnie Chatterjee got capped at just 8 hardcore elite engineers.
• For me this literally meant living on airplanes for 2.5 years to visit client projects which were completely on fire world-wide. Most of the time teams with up to 350 engineers following best practises, which hit a wall. My tasks included finding the biggest pain points on the fly, performance tuning and extreme debugging, both on client app and framework level (ExtJS & Sencha Touch), as well as enhancing architectures & creating roadmaps how to best move forward. Pretty often, my time on a project was limited to just 2 weeks and flying into a different time-zone afterwards.
• I deeply enjoyed diving into so many different client projects and getting a feeling of the intersections of the most common problems clients were dealing with.
• Getting sold for $320 / h came with an intense stress level. In parallel I helped out the trainings team led by David Marsland and moderated around fifteen 40h training classes. I also was a speaker at several international conferences.
• Clients I personally worked with include Accenture, Air Asia, Bouygues Telecom, Bosch, Citibank, Ericsson TV, HSBC and many others.
• I was on the winning team of both internal company hackathons which I took part in (Sencha Fleet & WebRTC).
• I am thankful for the time, since it made a deep impact on my problem solving skills.

Nov 2011 – Sep 2013 · 1 yr 10 mos

Mar 2011 – Nov 2014 · 3 yrs 8 mos · Munich, Bavaria, Germany

• Creating a Social Network Engine with Rich Waters, using Ext JS and Sencha Touch.
• Focus on grouped Video-Calls using WebRTC.
• My role had a strong focus on the UI, creating new widgets and custom components
• for Ext JS and Touch, including a 3d helix (pure DOM), a 3d gallery, the 3d circles
• (touch and ext), an animated dataview for touch (re-write from scratch) and many
• more (around 50 custom components in total).
• We were changing the Ext JS framework to have a better fit for our use: supporting
• HTML5, reducing the heavy DOM markup, improving the performance, etc.
• For the backend we used nodejs, touch-node (Modus Create) and mongodb. Each
• user got a websocket connection enabling us to push data to the clients in real time.
• We extended Ext Direct to work with websocket connections to fire events on the
• backend which get fetched inside the UI and created a wrapper to match Ext JS
• models to mongodb tables.

May 2010 – Oct 2011 · 1 yr 5 mos · Greater Munich Metropolitan Area

• I worked on creating the User Interface for a Performance Marketing Software including Bid Management, Cross Channel Tracking and Funnel analysis. The system was one of the world largest applications written in Ext JS. My role included creating custom components, as well as enhancing & debugging the framework.

Feb 2010 – Dec 2012 · 2 yrs 10 mos · Ruhr Region

• Part time project for creating Ext JS & Sencha Touch Design Themes (Skins).

Jan 2008 – Sep 2010 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

• I created the system to manage events and reservations completely on my own, starting with Ext JS 2 and later migrating to 3. The app contains around 25 custom components including a calendar similar to the
• Bryntum Scheduler, and was used inside a big beach volleyball center. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJrgFjohvVQ

Feb 2002 – Feb 2008 · 6 yrs · Münster, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

• Conception and implementation of a news search engine (crawler) with community aspects
• 10.000 news items were found daily during the development phase
• Joined supervision of the master thesis “Developing business models with the Web2.0, a case study of the news portal isaNews” of a Master of Business and Engineering (MBE) student at the entrepreneurship institute of the RWTH Aachen University
• I started developing an Ext JS 1.0 based User Interface in September 2007
• The project was dropped due to potential copyright issues after consulting a law agency specialised in Internet law (very strict in Germany at that time)

Jan 2000 – Jan 2002 · 2 yrs · Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · On-site

• After creating a business plan, four additional associates and I founded the plan-i
• GmbH in 1/12/2001. We focussed on creating a Content Management System
• (CMS). First experiences with MySQL, PHP 4, JavaScript, CSS, HTML.

Jul 1998 – Aug 1998 · 1 mo · Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany · On-site

• Basic training in mechanical & electrical engineering in the first half (like building an electronic cube from scratch), afterwards calibrating sensors for a mars rover.