About Me

Gaining knowledge of technical fundamentals and improving development skills in school and side projects, he quickly wanted to build software solutions to problems he had himself.
Developing an Android application allowing mobile access to the school's online platform later yielded a cooperation with the school cafeteria, presenting ads to 500+ students in exchange for free food.
This project made him officially register a company with a friend turned business partner to create further client websites, Android applications, and design work.

After high school, Patrick receives an offer for a dual studies Bachelor's Program at Deutsche Telekom AG.
He accepts going to university, as well as working for an enterprise content management (ECM) product department.
Here, he works on various proofs-of-concept, develops productivity tools and data transformation applications, and assists employees in the operations of customer systems. This early business experience allowed him to get a taste of various roles in a product lifecycle and allowed him to become an effective corporate technologist at a young age.
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One tool he built for a client's transformation pipeline processes around 15 million documents per day to this day (as far as he knows).

... as if studying and working full time was not enough...

Shortly after the Android-Kotlin debut at Google I/O 2017, Patrick started to work with his to-be favorite programming language when he was asked to build an Android app for managing agricultural areas with high biodiversity (size, types of flowers, condition, photos). Additionally, a discovery mode allowed visitors to map out their journey along popular routes and view information and descriptions about each area.

Although finishing top-of-class, he is not interested in additional traditional education but eager to start working.
He finally becomes an official member of the ECM department and assists in keeping customer systems healthy and up-to-date.Soon after, he additionally becomes responsible for driving the "sizing" efforts for the ImageMaster ECM department. Together with the performance testing and operations team, he analyses infrastructure utilization to optimally size the infrastructure of new customer environments (correct, no dynamic cloud scale-up/out)

Patrick is tasked with assisting the solution architect of a large project for a DAX 30 client. Reverse engineering the legacy system, gathering and making sense of requirements, analyzing BPMN solutions, and coordinating with enterprise architecture as well as data center specialists are only some of the tasks we worked on.
Soon after, a new sales opportunity for a major brokerage bank arises, and Patrick is put onto the project. From initial product demos to requirements engineering and finally winning the contract, it is a two-person show with the sales colleague.
He is then appointed project architect, specifies custom features for the development team, and conceptualizes the entire system from integration into the customer's IT landscape to migration plans.

With a vision of supporting German medium-sized businesses by offering a platform for banks to fulfill customer needs better, four founders start on a journey. As typical in an early-stage startup, his day consisted of various activities: From leading customer and employee interviews, managing the tech team in the Frankfurt office, building software and conceptualizing the product long-term, and much, much more. Within six months, the first version of the product was up and running before committing to a significant pivot. This pivot required a reengineering of almost the entire platform to adapt to our customer needs and market opportunity.

As the vision for the future drifted among the founding team, Patrick decided to leave the startup and go into freelancing full-time.
He was fortunate to get hired to build an exciting product from the ground up. He went through almost all development phases within the six contract renewals. Again, the area of responsibility was wide as he worked as part of a small autonomous team. From understanding what business stakeholders need and creating visual prototypes to better communicate to building the functionality in the backend in a highly scalable microservice environment.
He is proud that to this date, the most complex component of calculating points based on user-settable configurations with mere unlimited options (from customer segment to product manufacturer constraints and rule grouping logic) has not had a single calculation bug. Turns out that effective testing and clean code may be the key to excellent quality.

Having moved to Boulder, Colorado and embracing the outdoors to the fullest, Patrick started Travacado, an online platform aiming to become the one-stop-shop for all outdoor needs: From providing customizable curated gear lists to allowing groups to collaboratively plan their adventure.

In a bootstrapped manner, Patrick takes on a multifaceted role encompassing customer interviews, UX research and UI design, software architecture, and both front-end and back-end development. He focusses on ensuring system reliability through comprehensive testing, managing cloud deployments, and overseeing a team of content writers and other freelancers.

In parallel with his work on Travacado, Patrick shifted his consulting focus toward DevOps, specializing in cloud infrastructure and automation. His efforts centered around end-to-end cloud migration projects, leveraging Ansible and Terraform to achieve full automation.
This approach dramatically reduced deployment tasks up to 90%, transitioning clients from on-premise data centers to OpenStack-backed cloud environments, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and scalability.