The story so far...

I was always interested in computers and programming. The internet always was and is this big playground, where you could learn and try things. Unfortunately many years ago there where a lot less opportunities and I was a different person then. It took me until 2018 to realize that I do see my professional future in web development. From then on it took another 2 years to get good enough.

Sure, it was. Especially as I have two kids and the career change happened right in the first covid-phase. On the other hand I would have been heartbroken and still wondering what if, if I had not taken the risk.

In terms of job titles or positions? To be honest: nothing. What I do want to accomplish is something else entirely: I want to be challenged and supported. I do not want to do the same things over and over. I want to build great products with great tech, fight problems that make you almost despair and feel elated when the team finds a way to overcome them.

The truth is sometimes hard to swallow: I do have many talents, running my own successful business is not one of them. Being in charge of a company and that tasks and challenges this entails, are way to abstract for me. So I could not derive the next action from that and made too many decision based on feelings or pressure, as time was running out. This sounds really bad and harsh, but is fine and I made my peace with that. Not everybody must be able to do anything. I am a very bad manager, that I was I am applying as a developer ;-)

Yes, many, many years ago I trained as a professional in the hospitality industry. For a young man this was a fun job - until he learned that the payment is quite low and honestly in some parts of Germany not enough to live.

This is indeed a bit of a problem. While I do have testimonials from my earlier employers, they are not only in german, but also not really relevant. You might catch the general gist of what kind of employee I am though. So if you would like to read them, just tell me and I will send them to you promptly.

That was more than 20 years ago and I was a different person then. Ask my A.I. Assistant - he knows the whole story.

Of course, I do use A.I. There are things that the machine can do a lot better than us already. Finding bugs in complex GraphQl-Queries, finding the bottle neck in my SQL-query, that triples response times for instance. But "Deskilling is real" and I refuse to make my living by depending on the business case of a third party. This means I have to understand what A.I. is doing, why it is doing it and how the code works.

Simple is not equal to bad. I hope my visitors are here to find out if I fit into their company. If that hinges on every thing here moving, spinning, jiggling and what not, I am the wrong the guy. In my opinion you choose the tool for the job - in this case show static contect in the fastest and simplest way, and relay that information to the customer.

And, yes, I always wanted to build something slick with AstroJs, Vue and A.I. to be honest.

My projects you can find at my current employer. I am also "just" part of a team there, so I will not sell you everything as my own work.

As for side projects: There are a few - some are made for a single purpose and in record time, which means they are as hacky as they come. Other where started with great aspiration and now do reside on the pile of shame. Nothing a future employer needs or wants to see really ;-)