Greater Hamburg Area
I started software development commercially in 2001, with practical coding experience starting in 1992 on a Commodore C64 in BASIC. Throughout the years I worked at/for various companies including "SAP Research", "Schenck Rotec", "Schenck Process", "MobileBits" and also my own company "psd-darmstadt". I enjoy building up international engineering teams from the ground up, leading them, and glueing them together to form an efficient unit.
At Mindpeak I am leading a team of 4 engineers (growing). My responsibilites include: - Managing the team - Developing features for our frontend and backend (making our great AI models available to our customers) - Integrating our AI solutions into third party IMS and LIS systems - CI/CD automation using gitlab - Maintaining the server infrastructure (On-Prem, Dedicated Servers, and AWS), Monitoring, Alerting - GPU and Storage scaling - Managing IT Security - Internal and external IT support
I worked mainly on 1 game: -WeFarm - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bigpoint.wefarm Where I lead and managed an international team of 6 engineers. The game was developed using Unity and was available on Android, iOS and WebGL. My main achievement was setting up a Gitlab CI pipeline, where a simple git-"Tag" would result in a) readily available Android and iOS clients, automatically updating on device using AppCenter b) readily deployed Server environment c) readily available AssetBundles in our CDN d) with MS Teams integration to notify our QA department about a new build Other achievements were creating the whole AssetBundle downloading / loading / building system, a content validation system (enforcing / verifying a ruleset for content), setting up flexible branching strategy to allow workflows from 1 week to 4 week sprints, numerous performance improvements in shaders, general rendering and also the Unity-Editor (e.g. improved compile times, preview rendering performance and localization import times). For our GameDesign department I created a full GoogleSheets/MicrosoftExcel balancing data importer, enabling our GD department to use their favorite tools for balancing the data, and an easy way to import this straight into Unity. Interesting to mention is a switch from a pure mobile to a pure browser game in 3 months, and after some time completely back to mobile again, this time in 2 weeks. Apart from managing the one game project, I also supported multiple other projects within BigPoint in their conversion from flash to Unity-WebGL (Farmerama, DarkOrbit, Seafight), including Unity workshops to bring our flash developers up to speed.
I worked mainly on 2 games: -Heroes Realm - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.goodgamestudios.heroesrealm -Infernals - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.goodgamestudios.hellraiser Where I lead and build up a highly international team of 8 engineers. The games were developed using Unity and were serving Android, iOS, Facebook Gameroom and WebGL as platforms. My main achievements were planning the scalable architecture for client and serverside. Creating a solid and easy to follow code structure, where it was easy to introduce new team members and hard to create bugs. Some aspects I took care of include asset bundle handling (building, deploying, distributing) and a full CI pipeline to support development and QA.
I mainly worked on 3 games: -SoulCraft - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.mobilebits.soulcraftdefault -SoulCraft 2 - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.mobilebits.soulcraft2 -Heroes of SoulCraft - http://www.heroesofsoulcraft.com/ Where I lead and build up a team of 6 engineers. I worked on our in-house .NET multiplaform engine (Android, iOS, Amazon, Windows Store), writing graphics, physics, network, serverside, databases, in-house tracking, reports, and gameplay code for the 3 games. I also established a full CI pipeline for rapid releases using Jenkins.