What you may notice when looking at my projects, is that I have a faible for following my curiosity, exploring things and starting new projects. When my curiosity shifts, I have a hard time to follow through and most of the time stop working on previous projects.
Im Ausslandssemester in Göteborg, Schweden, probierte ich das erste Mal einen Haferdrink und war sofort von dem nussigen, leicht süßen Geschmack überzeugt. Ich kam zurück nach Österreich und fand damals nur Haferdrinks von großen etablierten Herstellern und dachte mir: "Das kann ja nicht so eine Wissenschaft sein und wir sollten doch auch alle Rohstoffe dafür regional in der Steiermark verfügbar haben".
Dies führte zu einer Reihe an Versuchen in der Küche mit verschiedensten Enzymen, Rohstoffen und einiges an Recherche zu Herstellprozessen. Nach zwei Jahren des "Teilzeit" experimentieren stellte ich das Projekt jedoch ein, da mir das nötige Prozess- und Lebensmittel Know-How einfach fehlte, ich immer mehr die Liebe zu Software fand und sich meine Interessen somit änderten.
Die Website baute ich damals mit Carrd ein Tool das ich kennen und schätzen lernte in dieser Zeit und immer noch mein Nummer 1 Tool ist um schnell und effizient One-Pager Landing Pages schnell ins World Wide Web zu bringen.
My first more serious attempt at building an app that makes sense in my opinion with a no-code tool. In this case I chose Glide.
The aim of the app is to act as a registry for self-service shops from farmers, which got quite popular in Austria when COVID hit.
Such stores are convenient for consumers and good for the farmers, as they don't have to give big cuts away to supermarkets.
I just struggled regularly with finding such self-service shops, which is why I wanted to solve my own problem with this little tool.
Tech Stack:
My first attempt at really "coding" a project, with a web development stack. Without knowing any of the stuff that I am doing. The aim of the tool was to process information from several .csv files, store that information in a database and do some calculations using all that data. In the end, the tool provided a nice dashboard view of the results and a PDF export functionality.
But with the help of ChatGPT I was able to deliver a fully working product natively on Windows and Mac machines.
The project was also the first time that I managed to pitch a project to a client, get the order and also deliver it successfully. The whole process was owned by myself.
Inspired by an article from Derek Sivers (Tech Independence) I set up my very own website on a self-hosted server. I still host my mail, calendar, contacts and this website on it.
My curiosity on hosting software on my own VPS continued and at that time I thought I want to start a blog anyways. So the logical conclusion for me was to self-host a Ghost Blog. Here I learned a lot about interacting directly with a Linux server and how to make applications on that server publicly accessible. I used dokku as an open-source PaaS and also got to know that really well.
I then repeated the process and set up another Ghost instance on the same server which is password-protected and only available to a group of friends.
In Q3/Q4 I started my backend development learning journey, which is still documented here. So after setting up the Ghost instance for my friends I developed a little node.js application using Mailgun API, to remind one of my friends each week to send a newsletter to all of us.
Also this service I host myself using dokku.
To this day this service is running smoothly and each week one of us sends a newsletter. Maybe not the biggest technical breakthrough, but I really love this project, as it helps us to stay connected although everyone is living at different places right now.
Tech Stack:
Along the way I coded some smaller Python tools, which did some data processing from .csv files and put the results after some processing again in csv or xsl files.
To be honest, Python was never something that I really learned and I relied mostly on ChatGPT for delivering these applications.
Tech Stack:
A little landing page for a local project.
Tech Stack:
In the scope of the work for Brokkr I got to work with the NestJS backend framework and built a tool to track performances of different ALM (automated liquidity management) providers.
In short, the tool does the following:
This is the first project which is on a larger scale than some small tooling for myself. And to be honest, I was also able to take a lot of the logic from other existing projects. But nevertheless, it's working very nice so far and sees more and more usage.
This project is still work in progress.
Out of personal necessity I started to build a little application for keeping my "Fahrtenbuch", with low maintenance. I want the ability to save favorite routes and their distance, which then enables me to have all data from just entering the start- or end odometer.