About Me

I'm a Software Developer living in Munich, Bavaria.

I didn't start out as a Software Developer though, but wanting to do something with movies or literature. So I did a Bachelors of "Literature - Art - Media" at the University of Konstanz.

After graduation, I decided to try and get into film school for screenwriting. I put lots of work into applications and even got invited to compete with my fellow applicants. In the end, I didn't make it past the final round.

So I thought to myself: "Well I'm going to be a screenwriter anyway" and got a job writing scripts for a german courtroom show. I quickly realized that the reality of working in the german TV industry as an averagely talented writer was completely different from what I had imagined my life as a screenwriter to be.

Simultaneously, my fascination with programming was growing more and more. Always having been more of an "arts" guy, I came in contact with programming pretty late, during a cross-disciplinary seminar in Konstanz.

I started out reading a German classic introduction to Java, but only really got hooked in the early days of Udacity. First "CS101: Intro to Computer Science" and then "CS253: Web Application Engineering", by Steve Huffman who is one of the founders of Reddit. I have very fond memories of both courses and especially the course taught by Huffman was so much fun and taught me a lot.

By then I hated my life as a screenwriter and couldn't imagine a career in that field anymore. But I had found something in programming that filled me with joy, where it wasn't even about what I created in the end or about what others thought of it. Just the mere act of typing stuff on my keyboard and making the computer do what I want felt like something close to magic, incredibly powerful and fulfilling.

Even though I liked programming a lot, I wasn't sure if I was any good at it. I also felt inferior to "real" programmers, because I had only discovered programming in my mid-twenties. So I quit my job as a screenwriter and signed up for three more years of university, to get some proper programming skills.

This time, it was the Technical University of Munich and I started out with Computer Science with a focus on Games Engineering. It seemed like a good match, because I liked games and games seemed to be at least loosely related to everything I had done before. But I quickly had the feeling of missing out on interesting Computer Science lectures in favor of the to me (surprisingly) less interesting Games curriculum. So I switched and was very happy with that decision.

Now I've been working as a Full-Stack Developer at the Süddeutsche Zeitung for five years.

Things I do other than programming: #