Work

tl;dr

I am a (front of the) frontend web developer who loves good user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design and is interested in web accessibility.

I have a keen eye for details and a knack for finding software and UI bugs. I work on a variety of projects together with my friends at scale.at. Sometimes, I also build websites and write blog posts.

How it started…

A book with the title 'HTML', an introduction for beginners

My journey in web development started when I was about 12 years old and my dad bought me a book about HTML. I created my first personal website and a website for my school class using table layouts, framesets, image maps and all the other great features HTML had to offer.

Later, I started blogging using a platform called “MyBlog” and eventually learned about the existence of “WordPress”. From this point on, I used it to build websites for family and friends.

After some weeks of studying technical mathematics, I realized that I loved math in school, but I preferred programming, algorithms and data structures at university, so I changed my course of study.

2010-2013
Media technology and -design
University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg
Bachelor studies | BSc | design/ux basics, programming, web technologies, video/audio processing, photography, and more…
2013-2016
Computer Science
Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz
Master studies | Dipl.-Ing. | main subject 'Intelligent Information Systems': artificial intelligence, machine learning, knowledge based systems, recommender systems, search engines, and more…

In 2016, after I finished my studies, I got my first full-time job as a web developer at Dynatrace. In the beginning, it felt like I didn’t know anything (anymore?) and had to learn a lot of new stuff.

2015-2016
Web Frontend Developer
holis market | part-time
I supported the first zero waste grocery shop in Linz by maintaining the corporate website and developing the frontend of the planned holis online platform.
2016-2020
Software Developer
Dynatrace | full-time
My team maintained internal company web entities (marketing website, technical documentation, blog) and started building a web component library that later became the first Dynatrace design system, called Barista.

While I was busy migrating and merging three large WordPress blogs, my team set up a static site generator for other websites we maintained and I was immediately enthusiastic about the topic.

Inspired by this concept, I changed my workflow from building WordPress websites to using the JAMstack architecture and separating the website build from the actual content. And, I wrote an article about it.

My skills have expanded, I have overcome a part of my imposter syndrome and started teaching web development basics at FH Hagenberg. In parallel, I decided to write a blog series about the content of my lessons.

2018-2024
Lecturer
University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg | part-time
Teaching web design and -development, user experience and accessibility basics

In addition to maintaining websites, my team at Dynatrace started building a design system. We always worked closely together with the user experience team, which sparked my interest in this field.

After some years working in a steadily growing company, I felt like trying something new and decided to become self-employed and started my own business in 2020.

How it’s going

I still can’t come up with a job title that summarizes my daily tasks 😅.

2020-now
Web Frontend & UX Developer
scale.at | self-employed
I build frontend code for websites and web applications, focusing on good HTML and CSS code. I believe that a good foundation is the key to a maintainable codebase and that inclusive design shouldn’t be optional.

Here’s what I do: Together with my clients, I develop solutions for specific problems. I talk and discuss a lot. I research and learn about user experience design and try to stay on top of things when it comes to new features on the web platform. I build frontend code for websites and web applications. I fix and refactor broken code. I create design prototypes in Figma. I do UX audits and give feedback when I find visual inconsistencies and incomprehensible workflows in a user interface.

Here’s what I don’t do: I am not a designer. I can tell when things look good or bad (and usually know why), but I’m not a “let’s build a shiny animated website” person. I also don’t do marketing or SEO.

Websites showcase

Here are some of the websites I built and maintained during the last couple of years.

I love to keep things simple. I prefer websites that present content in a readable and understandable way. I hate it when there are more animations, cookie and tracking banners, broken JavaScript and error messages than actually interesting content.