👋 Hello, my name is
I'm passionate about guiding teams through the complexities of distributed architectures with an empathic approach that creates lasting value. From deciding on service boundaries to managing dependencies and high-load operations, I help teams find sustainable solutions that balance product needs with technical excellence. Want to build software that stands the test of time while keeping your team energized and effective?
Let's explore how we can work together: my curriculum vitae (CV).
Politics
Every action we take, every interaction we have, exists within and influences our broader political reality. Coming from a position of white male privilege, I acknowledge the historical legacy of oppression, patriarchy, and colonialism that demands active compensation and reparative work from those who have benefited from these systems. As a feminist and ally, I recognize my responsibility to challenge systemic inequalities and support women's rights and liberation. Throughout my journey, I've actively used my privileged position to advocate for and support underrepresented communities — a practice I remain deeply committed to continuing. I'm dedicated to using my position to amplify underrepresented voices and advocate for meaningful social change. While this commitment runs deep, I've learned through personal experience with depression and burnout that sustainable advocacy requires maintaining healthy boundaries. As part of this, I choose not to engage professionally with individuals who promote discriminatory ideologies or express bigotry in any form, including fascism, xenophobia, transphobia, misogyny, or other harmful beliefs. My focus remains on creating positive change while preserving the emotional and mental resources needed for effective advocacy.
Focus Areas
Organizing software often follows the overall organizational structure and vice-versa, while the key impact factors might differ. Splitting and distributing services has implications beyond a mere technical scope.
Software architecture is about trade-offs, which should be aligned with company and product startegy.
I love discussing these topics with business and engineering teams. The requirements are most often not only of a purely technical nature but trade-offs should be analyzed and weighted together to get and document a shared understanding.
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One of the key challenges in every project, even driven by technology, will be the team. I believe only functional teams can deliver the quality and speed we all want to see. I also strongly believe that empathy, not only for your team members but also for customers and users is most important.
Be empathic to solve the challenges ahead.
Almost everybody has positive intentions, but only mutual empathy, which also implies respect for people from all backgrounds, will allow us to see good intentions shine. This especially means opening the space you own for underrepresented groups.
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Only with maintainable, adaptable, and resilient code are you able to create sustainable software. While I love creating prototypes and they certainly make sense to find your product-market fit, we should focus on sustainability – not only in software. And isn't software maintenance more like gardening than anything else?
Make and keep code maintable, for example by refactoring, for sustainability.
Performance and efficient scalability can also be an aspect of sustainable software and the solution might not always be the latest technology trend.
⬅ ➡Get me Interested
Important Values
- Fighting the climate emergency
- Advance learning and teaching in cooperation with teachers
- Finding ways to reduce propagation of hate – especially against "intelligent" attention boosting algorithms
- Connect people from different backgrounds to reduce xenophobia, sexism, transphobia, etc.
With Tideways and Frontastic I co-founded two SaaS product companies, one bootstrapped and one venture-capital funded. I love creating value for others by solving challenges – especially if those challenges are aligned with my personal values.
But a lot value also exists in legacy software. I actually love refactoring and enhancing software which has proven value to make it more sustainable for all people working with the software – developers and users.
Creating value and positive impact are the keys to sparkle curiosity in me.
Mentoring developers towards maintainable code and infrastructure still is very close to my heart. My experience with investors, product managers and even great sales people during the last years allow me to guide in intersectional challenges, from technical due diligences to adapting team structures to work towards a shared vision.
My Background
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Code in production
PHP, JavaScript (Vanilla, React, TypeScript, …), Go, Ansible, Bash, HTML, CSS, SVG
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Luckily not in production anymore (I hope)
Java, Python, Perl, Ruby, C, C++, C#
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Code I also enjoyed writing
Haskell, Lisp, Elixir, XSLT
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Fond, but old, memories
QBasic, Logo, Turbo Pascal, Asembler
I have written code for 29 years, in many different languages, and still enjoy being able to craft things out of basically nothing. Being aware that our work is always built upon the work of others I believe in OpenSource and try to follow its principles. I prefer GPL over MIT.
Languages do not matter – creating value does.
I don’t think that creating code in a particular language has more “worth” more than code in another language. Selecting the right paradigm and virtual machine for a project is most important. I want to craft solutions and create value and not argue about personal preferences.
I still code in VIM in the console and run Linux – after all those years I do not feel bad for it.
I studied computer science and wrote my diploma thesis about automatic schema learning from XML files , involving the generation of nice and readable regular expressions.
While studying I already started working as a software developer implementing various customer projects. I quickly headed over to a team developing an OpenSource component library – probably one of the first test-driven projects in the PHP world.
Knowledge transfer is the key to seniority, but no easy skill to master.
Starting during this time, but also during the years to come, I wrote many articles for different technology magazines and blogs, some books, and gave hundreds of conference talks.
The mission of taking the knowledge on testing and quality assurance into other companies led to founding Qafoo together with Tobias Schlitt and Manuel Pichler. In the upcoming years, we helped many teams improve their software's quality.
Together with Benjamin Eberlei we also founded Tideways, the best application performance monitoring software for PHP applications.
After founding Frontastic in 2017 and building the company as its CTO we sold it to commercetools in 2021. I'm still responsible for the product (and some additional products) and focus on extending and scaling it in the new organization.
In my free time, I love to cook and am not too bad at it. Generally speaking: Everything I can do with my hands, like DIY in our house, showed to relax me and be a great counterpart to my daily work. You'll find some examples of this in my photos feed.
Relaxing in our garden and just enjoying time with my wife and daughter are the luxuries I work for. Combine this with good food and you'll get a happy Kore.