Ever since I was a little boy ... I'd be lying if I said I knew I wanted to be a software engineer already as a kid.
I realized that only at the end of my master's studies in electrical engineering. Prior to that, I wanted to be a fisherman, a diver, a professional alpine skier or windsurfer, and even a garbage man - I mean, who wouldn't want to surf at the back of the truck.
What I always knew was that if I did something, I wanted to be the best at it. With that in mind, I co-founded typless.com in 2017 - a data extraction software company. We were doing AI before AI was cool. Some of my colleagues recognized my engineering work - that's how I started teaching the Web development for beginners course at SmartNinja, and later started writing for testdriven.io.
Despite all the engineering work, I kept my love for sports and the outdoors and started a family of my own. The time I spent with my wife and two daughters at the seaside or in the mountains was so precious that I dug as deeply as I could to find more effective ways to deliver software to customers. Ways that would help me avoid fighting production fires on the weekend. Ways to deliver more software of higher quality in less time than others.
My courses and articles became a way to formulate things for myself and then share them with others. To this day, I have written only about things I actually use in my day-to-day work. When I started at Ren, I took my Scalable FastAPI apps on AWS course out and used it to spin up the whole AWS infrastructure. When I wanted to refine our testing techniques for the AI era, I wrote the Complete Python Testing Guide and used it to improve the performance of our AI agents.
To this day, I believe that if you want to really be the best on your team, you need to help others so much that they no longer need you. Everything is written down so anyone can take a look and follow the process. I believe customers deserve software products that are reliable and "make their problems go away".
I'm also convinced that the best ideas strike you when you're in nature. That's why, when I'm not developing the next feature that customers will love or speaking at a conference, you'll find me skiing, windsurfing, running trails, or with my family.
