About

In 2023 I was working at Berlin Opera Academy in an operational role when I noticed that every student went through the same lifecycle: application, payment, confirmation, follow-up. Clear triggers, clear rules, clear outputs. I taught myself Google Apps Script from scratch and built an automation suite that replaced two full-time administrative positions, saving the company €74,000 per year. That project proved to me that I could deliver real business impact as an engineer.

Since then I've built production systems for clients across Berlin: a real estate intelligence pipeline using n8n, Apify, and Gemini; a marketing site for a music tech startup built to pixel-perfect Figma specs in Vue; web infrastructure for a wellness retreat in PHP. Every engagement has come with a different stack. What carries across them is the part that isn't the stack: reading an unfamiliar codebase until I can argue about its design rather than just close tickets in it, and being the one who checks a claim before it ships.

Two of those engagements have been running since May 2026. Showdeck is a production management platform for live performance, where I work fullstack. Hotel Agentur is a hotel marketing agency, where I handle technical SEO, Python content pipelines, and performance across a multi-site hotel portfolio. Both are client-owned codebases, so the details stay with the clients.

I work AI-natively, which in practice means most of my day goes to reviewing generated code rather than typing it. That is the part I've had to get good at, and it isn't speed: reading a diff line by line, running an adversarial pass whose only instruction is to refute the change, proving a test fails against the broken code before trusting that it passes against the fix. A clean agent review is signal, not proof.

Generated code is confidently wrong in specific, repeatable ways: the green test that asserts nothing, the review that passes for the right answer and the wrong reason, the claim that something was unavoidable when three counter-examples sit a grep away. I keep a written record of the ones I hit so the same failure doesn't get through twice. Claude Code and Cursor are core to how I develop, not shortcuts but force multipliers, and the guardrails are what make it safe to be fast.

In spring 2026 I ran a "10 projects in 10 weeks" challenge to push my shipping pace and put the range on the record. All ten shipped, and most of them are written up here.

Outside of engineering I still sing (though opera has been replaced by the occasional karaoke bar). I speak English natively and German at B2. These days I keep a steady load of client work and room alongside it for the next good project.