About

Born in 1983 in a small Brandenburg city near the Polish and Saxon borders, I grew up tinkering with a Commodore C64 my parents bought after the wall fell—complete with stacks of 64er magazines and floppies. While friends played Street Fighter, I was typing code listings and matching checksums, completely hooked.

At 14, I got my first PC: an AMD 486 DX4 with 133 MHz and 16MB RAM. I have fond memories wrestling with Autoexec.bat and Config.sys, installing Windows 95 from 14 disks, and taking my first steps with Visual Basic, Turbo Pascal, and SuSE Linux. I caught the tail end of 56k internet and experimented with SelfHTML, FrontPage, DreamWeaver, and Flash.

During Computer Science studies in Senftenberg, I finally got answers to my questions through courses on digital circuitry and machine programming. I’ve always preferred solving real problems through computing over abstract computer science puzzles. This led me to work at Vattenfall Mining, exploring how RFID and software could optimize mining equipment maintenance.

I started programming professionally in 2008, but my fascination with technology runs much deeper. Over the years I’ve worked with tons of technologies—some now vintage. I’ve navigated Waterfall projects, transitioned teams to Scrum and Kanban, and leveraged my love for tinkering and Linux to dive into operations for true DevOps. Working alongside brilliant, like-minded people has shaped me into the opinionated Engineering Manager I am today.

Hi, my name is Thomas and I’m passionate about building both software and software teams, and I still love bending machines to my will. ;)