Public Speaking - Sharing knowledge and experiences

In my career as an IT Consultant and Software Engineer, I was fortunate to attend conferences on company time. These experiences made me start my own journey as a public speaker, sharing my insights and experiences, particularly in the areas of Cloud Native development, Kubernetes, CICD, and real-world applications of AI.

Engaging with Cloud Native communities has been invaluable. It has allowed me to see how different teams approach common problems and how this drives innovation.

More recently, I’ve been diving into Generative AI. I’m interested in the ways AI Services like OpenAI, LLama or LangChain integrate into existing applications and how this new approach generates value for users.

If you’d like to know more about the talks I’ve given, please check out my list of presentations and topics!

Podcast Host - Deep diving into expert topics

Just before my Sabbatical, a collegue of mine approached me. He wanted to start a podcast but needed another partner hosting it. This was the start of me hosting notJustCoding right after my sabbatical. In the podcast I have the opportunity to ask the beginners questions and dive a bit deeper into areas I’m not that fimiliar with.

Sharing experiences, be it my own or giving a plattform for other to do so plays a huge role in my career and I’m very happy to have the opportunity to do just that.

Sabbatical - Learning about new cultures

From the moment I could decide, I spent my working time in tech, be it working as an IT Consultant, studying Software Engineering and Distributed Systems, or completing a week-long internship at an IT Service provider during school. I considered tech and IT my safe haven.

In 2020, I decided I needed to know if I’m in IT because I enjoy it or if I’m IT because I’m afraid to try something new. To find out I applied for a six-month sabbatical, which started in 2023. Back then I had no plan for what I wanted to do in these six months, in the years I made up my mind: I wanted to travel, first in Europe to visit all the places that made up the continent I grew up on and after that fulfilling a life-long dream of traveling to New Zealand.

Traveling in Europe made me appreciate the continent from another perspective. Be it the spiritual experience of visiting Meteora or the historic flair of Budapest, I still find myself falling back daydreaming about the journey I took.

Sabbatical - Fulfilling childhood dreams

I wanted to visit New Zealand from a young age. In the second half of my Sabbatical, this childhood dream became true. For three months, I traveled through NZ, visiting the north and south islands, and was awed by the astounding landscapes that NZ has to offer.

In these three months, I had a lot of time thinking about my life and the decisions that led me to be there. As the whole sabbatical was meant to distance myself from Tech and find out, if I wanted to return, most of the time tramping through the country I spent with different ideas of “What to do next?”. Traveling alone and out of season also gave me the space to get to know the country at my pace without the stress that usually accompanies my life and my job.

After three months, I decided to continue my work in tech and focus especially on solving real issues, as this is the part of my work that I find the most fulfilling and that I enjoy the most.

Lego - Create with modular building blocks

In my free time, I enjoy building Lego. Since my job is very creative and forces me to think outside the box a lot, I enjoy the fixed rules when building with Lego and more often than not follow the instructions and marvel over the model that these bricks create.

Recently I started with a small project, building a modular medieval landscape out of legos and sets that I already own. Mostly this was meant as a similar relaxing hobby, but I quickly realized that building with these blocks without instruction is way more mentally taxing than I initially thought. So in very small steps, I hope I will be able to complete this project.

Woodworking - Designing and building solid solutions