About

I am Andreas, Scrum Master and Software Developer from Hamburg, Germany.

I started my career with an apprenticeship for becoming a Sozialversicherungsfachangestellter — or Sozifa in short — in the german public pension system.

Also, I created the first websites during these years and decided to study something with information technology. So I started studying Business Information Systems at Leuphana University in Lüneburg in 2005.

Nowadays I am working as a Software Developer and Scrum Master. What started in the early 2000's as a hobby I am doing for a living now. Neat!

There is something called the agile manifesto

The very first programming course in University was where I first heard of the Agile Manifesto, Extreme Programming and Scrum. I didn't really realised what this means until years later, around 2014, when Scrum was introduced in the company I was working at.

I experienced both, strict waterfall, as well as agile approaches in software development processes. While the first might be perceived as generally problematic, agile development methodologies in general, and Scrum in particular, are no silver bullet.

Still lots of challenges and they are (sometimes) just slightly different, but I think mostly related to human nature and organizational behavior.

However, I prefer to work in an agile environment and not just because one would expect me to say that due to my profession.

Coding

Software development is an incredible fast moving field. It feels, it's changing even quicker nowadays than it did back then. I'm thankful for the invention of RSS that keeps me organised and kind of up-to-date in these regards.

However, keeping track of everything new and to decide on what to follow-up on and what rather not, is difficult, I think. This website might also help here. In writing things down, I try to bring myself to deal with (not only) technical topics in more depth. Plus, the focus on a particular topic often requires to look into additional stuff and beyond.

Writing

Writing is a whole new level of planning ahead for me. It's totally different from planning in software development. When it comes to code, my daily work is often not visible to the public at all. Sometimes only to a few people. Writing your own blog however is fully learning/working in public, therefore entirely different to me.

I am confident about my writing when explaining things to non-tech folks at work and received positive feedback. However, that's work and it's a bit different.

So the goal is to get used to write in public, to work on that and to improve my writing in general.

What to expect

Coding in the web and everything agile surely will be the main focus of the writing. However, there might be additional topics. Being a Linux user for a few years now regularly results in new learnings for me. I'm using Mint and it gets the job done.

Setting up Apache on an OSX system was to some degree entirely different to me than on Linux. Lately I found a flow in converting videos in FFmpeg that I would consider now as perfectly fitting for me.

All these topics on the side might find their way into this blog as well.

Why this name?

I don't know. One day, I woke up and this englishified abbreviation to my last name came to my mind. The domain existed for some time now. I draw something on a piece of paper that looked similar to the logo in the header, played around with Figma, got a logo or whatever this is and here we are.

A bit more about me

The "I don't know what to say" section. I thought a list might help:

born in the middle of the 80's
grown up in rural northern Germany
fan of music in general, enjoying multiple, not at all related, genres equally
music maker, even though this happens less often nowadays
owner of an MPC 500.
fan of pixel graphics, sketch notes, lettering
fan of casually browsing design platforms like dribbble (back in the days) for all of the three arts above
… might be continued