Amsterdam Light Festival, 2014 - Foto © Goldbach
Hybrid Tech &Real Solutions
Full-stack developer, tech & business generalist, and entrepreneurial lateral thinker with over four decades of experience in digital transformation.
As a full-stack developer, I build frontend, backend, and REST APIs – my tool of choice is Laravel.
For fast, modern websites I primarily rely on Astro and Nuxt today, and on headless CMS like Strapi and Sanity on the backend.
JavaScript frameworks like Vue as well as libraries like Alpine.js and vanilla JS are firmly rooted in my daily work. For styling I mainly use Tailwind, occasionally Bootstrap.
On my unusual career path – from hospitality through my own companies to software development – I gained a lot of business experience: from writing a business plan to managing entire projects. More on that in the timeline below.
Milestones
- Today
Creating websites and developing custom frontend, backend, and API solutions for new and existing applications. Leading projects across a variety of fields.
- 2020
Opening of THE17 · Serviced Apartments Cologne.
- 2016
Opening of Work. Meet. Eat. – concept store and pop-up store in Cologne.
- 2010
Opening of Kolbs im Kulturquartier – eight years as owner of a museum catering business in Cologne.
- 2005
I used my sales & marketing experience from the hotel industry to build my own price comparison system for hotel bookings – complete with my own data warehouse system, web crawler, and booking engine (IBE). This gave rise to the company HTRS (Hotel & Ticket Reservation System).
- 2001
Hotel Manager Rooms, Sales & Marketing at the Kosmos Hotel Cologne – repositioning of sales & marketing, business plan, and yield management for 161 rooms and two conference rooms.
- 1997
Supervisor Fleet Accounting, Controlling & Finance at AVIS Rent a Car Germany – accounts receivable accounting and asset management for around 40,000 vehicles per year.
- 1994
Founded my first company, Goldsoft – software development and server management. With the switch to dBase and Clipper, I was able to offer the software as multi-user and network-capable. At the same time, I moved into a role as sales manager for conferences and congresses at the Hotel Intercontinental Frankfurt.
- 1990
Moved into the hotel industry: hotel vocational school in Bad Reichenhall, followed by training as a hotel manager at the Hotel Intercontinental Frankfurt.
- 1987
Training as a tax and business consulting assistant. At the same time, I built my first professional applications for asset management, accounting, and controlling with QuickBasic, and set up and installed my first networks with MS-DOS.
- 1982
It all started with the Sinclair ZX81 computer. I developed my first games and programs for the CP/M and DOS operating systems using the programming languages Basic, Pascal, and Assembler.