About me

I’ve been building software for the web for over 12 years.

My passion project together with my partner Martha is konsens, a free online tool for group decision-making. It helps reduce the back-and-forth in group chats when families or friends are trying to agree on something. But our bigger goal is to actually bring more democratic decision-making into organizations.

My current full-time job is being a member at Mein Grundeinkommen. We’re a worker-owned association researching the benefits and feasibility of universal basic income. I work there as a video producer and full-stack developer, building online surveys and user flows for researchers and new website for our campaigns and studies. I especially enjoyed building this tax calculator, which allows to interactively explore the results from the economic microsimulation study from DIW institute. It enables anyone to change Germany’s tax system via a web user interface and immediately see how these changes would affect our society.

From 2017 to 2022 I was the Head of Development at diesdas.digital, where I hired, supported, and mentored our developers, advised the company’s founders, and helped clients find the best technical solutions for their needs. You can read more about my time working there in my recap of the first two years and in my farewell blog post. From a technical perspective, I was really proud how we managed to prevent cheating in our online games by recording complete game sessions from players with just a few kilobytes. On the diesdas blog we published a two-part technical explanation from me and my colleague Erkal about how we managed to achieve this. Spoiler: functional programming enables really cool possibilities.

Between 2015 and 2017 I lived and worked in London at Improbable, which was listed twice as one of the world’s smartest companies from MIT Technology Review. The technology was impressive and working on the user interface was a rewarding challenge—but I’m very sad seeing it now used to power the metaverse and support military applications. You can see an early version of the user interface I built with custom shaders, three.js, the functional reactive programming library most.js, in this talk from Rob Whitehead at Google Next '17.

From 2013 to 2015 I worked as a software developer at Edenspiekermann in Berlin, where I got to build websites for big brands and I still got to know Erik Spiekermann, which was cool. We already built hybrid React applications in 2015 back then, but with progressive enhancement, so that downloading the JavaScript was completely optional. It was my first job after earning my Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Media from Stuttgart Media University.

In my spare time I’m also politically active and try to spread important findings from cognitive science that our perception of society is greatly influenced by the language we use when speaking about political problems. I also make electronic music, play the piano, shoot analog and digital photos, do a bit of fitness at home, and I enjoy writing and publishing thoughts on a range of topics here on my website.