Web development provides me with a creative outlet. I built my first website for my mom's book store about the time I turned 20. It was a one pager using bootstrap.
Ever since, I've had the dream of becoming a fullstack developer. I started working through the Odin Project to learn the basics.
Another chance for practice presented itself when my sister started a counseling business. I built her site using plain HTML and CSS. I used tailwindcss for the first time.
Over the course of my studies in computer science, I worked on several projects. One was a tool to automatically grade handwritten exams. The backend was built in python and used openCV for image processing. For the frontend, I tried react.
On the side, I worked at Carl Zeiss IQS as a working student. There, I contributed to a sensorics dashboard built in Angular. I also got some experience working with data transfer using MQTT, Websockets and BLE.
For my practical study semester I went to work at Bosch Manufacturing Solutions. There I built my first fullstack application from scratch. The app allowed searching for development projects and showed status infos. Project data was retrieved from a MongoDB and a Postgres database. The frontend was Angular and the backend API was built in .NET with C#.
During my bachelors thesis, I created another fullstack application using the same stack. This time at Carl Zeiss SMT. It was a report automation tool, which allowed easy visualization of measurement results fed in as CSV files.
To start off my career, I went to work at Karcher. I started as a developer in the B2B eCommerce team. I soon took on responsibility as technical lead for a distributed team.
I continued to program on the side. My first project after graduation was a fullstack project which I saw as my personal capstone project. It was a plattform for sharing, browsing and selling teaching materials. NestJS was used for the backend and react for the frontend. Keycloak was used as identity provider. I hosted the app on digitalOcean.
During that time I worked on my deployment workflow. Github actions was used to ssh code onto my VM and build docker images there. All my apps ran on a single digitalOcean VM. I used docker compose to organize apps and nginx as a reverse proxy to forward traffic to the right app.
After the project had progressed far enough for me to label it as finished, I built a personal blog using 11ty.
The next project was a mortgage calculator where I tried next.js for the first time.
My digitalOcean VM got full. I learned about Hetzner and moved my projects over. To do this efficiently I created all my infra as code using terraform.
To level up my deployment game, I created a three node kubernetes cluster using k3s. To have everything as code, I used ansible to set it up. ArgoCD serves as my GitOps tool.
Instead of ssh'ing code over to my VMs I started building the images in the pipeline and stored them in GHCR. Secrets are fetched from AWS parameter store.
In order to get ready to accept website building jobs on the side, I played around with Ghost CMS and built a PoC.
The tool didn't convince me for my use case so I tried strapi instead. I added strapi as a backend to a previous project and built another site for a potential customer. I used next.js to build it. After a CVE with score 10 that affected next.js I reconsidered the choice.
This lead me to the presence, where I am using astro.js to build this site.