CV
See a compact version of my CV if you like to keep or print it.
Developer at Government Digital Service, Jul 2016–present
is leading the digital transformation of the British government by helping it make digital services and information simpler, clearer and faster.
I spent the first six months at GDS in the Content Tools team of GOV.UK. I worked mostly with Ruby on Rails.
Since beginning of 2017 I work in the Accessibility team. We rarely build anything ourselves (except documentation, often with Middleman, a static site generator in Ruby, or prototypes in Node.js) but help other teams making new patterns more accessible. Since 2018 my part of the team concentrates on helping the GOV.UK programme to become more self-sufficient in accessibility. We do that by developing and providing training, consulting teams and more.
Senior Web Developer at Zopa, Jan 2013–Mar 2016
is the UK’s leading peer-to-peer lending service.
I mainly worked on the front-end (HTML, CSS/SASS, JavaScript) and web back-end (Ruby [Rails, Sinatra, Jekyll], .NET MVC) of all customer-facing websites, directly collaborating with designers, back-end developers, product owners, testers and the UX team in an Agile environment. A great and rewarding challenge was unifying Zopa’s scattered front-end and improving it by making its design more modern, accessible and responsive. Maintenance and collaboration was also improved greatly by sharing the same code base and using a living style guide.
I championed company-wide knowledge sharing and also organised a few workshops. During the last year I was mentoring a couple of juniors and line-managing four other developers.
Senior Front-End Developer at Precedent, Nov 2011–Sep 2012
is a communications agency specialising in digital, brand and print design.
Apart from the day to day front-end work (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc), I worked on setting (and keeping) coding standards and improving collaboration between the different disciplines and offices.
My projects have been very diverse, including working with different CMS (Sitecore, Umbraco, Drupal, WordPress), optimising web sites for mobile devices and adhering to accessibility standards (usually WCAG level AA).
Web Developer at Time Out, Jan 2010–Sep 2011
is a publishing company specialised in reviews, listings of events and travel guides for all major cities around the world.
Being the only front-end web developer for the majority of the time, my main area of work was the front-end (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript with jQuery and HTML for emails) of Time Out’s comprehensive website. But I also helped out in the back-end (mostly Symfony, a PHP MVC framework) and was in charge of the blog (run by WordPress).
We were following Agile principles and were maintaining our code with git.
I was responsible for the maintenance of the website and development of new components and areas of the site, working in close contact with project managers, designers and editors. Integration and setup of advertising through OpenX was also part of my job.
Developer at LendAround, Dec 2009–Jan 2010
I was hired to completely rewrite the front-end of LendAround’s website. During the short but intense time I did some usability testing and code review and learned a lot about Symfony (a PHP MVC framework).
Due to an unexpected change in their business needs, development had to stop and all staff was made redundant.
User Interface Developer at Haymarket, Jan 2009–Dec 2009
is a large publishing company with its headquarters in London, UK, whose web development department "Haymarket Business interactive" takes care of the online versions of Haymarket’s business-orientated magazines.
As a User Interface Developer I worked closely with project managers, information architects, designers and back-end developers. The main part of my work comprised of XHTML and CSS coding in a ColdFusion environment. I also learned HTML for e-mails and increased my Photoshop skills.
My work routine also contained QA testing, regular support work and bug-fixes, documenting and structuring shared information in our intranet wiki (Confluence). As we usually followed Scrum principles, I got familiar with the Agile way of working.
Web Developer at CosmoCode, Sep 2005–Aug 2008
is a small IT company in Berlin, Germany, which specialises in standard web solutions and customised applications and much more.
I was mainly working with our in-house Java CMS (written in Java and JSP) using cross-browser HTML, CSS and JavaScript (often with jQuery), Rhino (server-side JavaScript) and our own formelML. (Sometimes we used other CMS like TYPO3 or Joomla.) This work required analysing and/or developing the conceptual design, much communication with the customers, testing the application, documenting the editorial workflow and training the editors, followed by the usual bug-fixes and regular maintenance and support. I was also responsible for the management of smaller projects and for drafting a few offers.
The other projects were mostly tailor-made software solutions, very often developed in PHP (sometimes in combination with a PHP framework like CodeIgniter) and often maintained via SVN. We had a few DokuWiki customers for whom I developed or customised templates and plugins, installed, configured and administered their installation and answered support request by phone or email.
Vocational training at CosmoCode (and others), Sep 2002–Aug 2005
The work I did at CosmoCode was basically the same as in my permanent employment (see above), except for the fact that the projects were more focussed on our formelCMS.
The vocational training in those 3 years was a shared training between Pfefferwerk (the official training company) and CosmoCode (which acted as the “real” training company). And, as is the usual practice in Germany, I also visited a part-time vocational IT school, where I learned all the theory (application systems, information and communication systems, business administration, civics and economics and technical English).
My training was supervised by “the Chamber of Industry and Commerce (a public corporation), the competent agency under the Vocational Training Act” (cited from the certification).
Pre-vocational training preparation, Oct 2001–Jul 2002
The courses from the DAA included in that year were EDP (Word, CorelDraw, PhotoShop, Flash, Dreamweaver), English, Marketing, Communication and Law. Part of that year was also going to a part-time school and a few months of pre-vocational period of work experience, which I completed at CosmoCode. This led directly to the vocational training.
Casual jobs, Oct 1999–Sep 2001
Apart from taking up several casual jobs, I used my private time to learn HTML and CSS and to build my first web site.
University, Oct 1998–Sep 1999
I studied musicology and mathematics for a year at the Humboldt-Universität in Berlin.
Voluntary ecological gap year, Sep 1997–Jul 1998
In my FÖJ (year taken to do voluntary work in the environmental sector) I mostly worked in the office of the BUND (League for the environment and nature conservation) in Braunschweig, Germany. I learned handling customers and organising a press conference. This was also the very first time I worked with a computer. Timid at first, I grew into an “expert” (measured on the standards at the office) very fast. The year was organised and funded by the Niedersächsisches Landesamt für Ökologie (Office for Ecology in Lower Saxony).