In March 2018 I moved on to the Core-Banking team which started using CQRS and Event Sourcing to build an abstraction on top of the core banking system that solarisBank is using at the moment. The team consisted of three developers. The transition also meant onboarding of a new Tech Lead for my former team. Furthermore, I supported the team to create lightweight processes for development and organisation.

When I joined the team it consisted of Junior, Professional and Senior developers. I helped creating a balance between them with regards to decision making and creating suggestions.

In addition to that I took over infrastructural tasks and worked on the existing Ruby applications. As the team relies on Go for new services I started to make myself familiar with the language.

Besides that I drove different cross team initiatives like consistent monitoring of Ruby applications as well as a standard style guide for Ruby projects. In general, I am also still consulting teams I have been working in before.

After having worked as a developer in the Digital Banking team I took the role of the Tech Lead. Some of my responsibilities in that role have been:

• enabling the team to gain technical competence,
• improving the integration of the teams architecture into the system architecture of the company,
• mentoring of new and old colleagues,
• solve conflicts between team members together with our Agile Coach and
• in general helping the resolve blockers (e.g., fixing bugs, investigating causes of incidents, infrastructure tasks) to make the team work smoothly.

I supported the company to scale the team to eleven developers. Additionally, I fostered remote working and pairing culture. In the end three developers worked remotely. I also developed a tech roadmap for the team to improve monitoring of the services we owned and to further break apart the monolith.

The Digital Banking team became the blue print of the agile transformation for other teams in the company. A lot of processes we introduced have been transferred to various teams.

In the end of 2017 we split the Digital Banking team into two teams with focus on identifications as well as accounts and transactions. I took the Tech Lead role in the latter. The majority of the team consisted of new developers that I helped to onboard.

I began working at solarisBank in the three person Escrow/Payments team. Besides implementing smaller features in the Ruby application to extend the API this was the time that we worked on the split of Escrow and Digital Banking. Both had been living in the same code base till then.

The number of people working on the two products grew and it got harder and harder to coordinate the efforts. Hence, it made sense to split the projects on the code level. This involved making the code independent by separating the two domains and creating the first service next to the monoilth. Finally, the data needed to be separated as well.

Besides that I collaborated in the move to a new CI solution and the infrastructure that our services run on.

In the beginning of 2017 I started working on the Digital Banking product. The team consisted of two Product Owners, an Agile Coach and five developers. I started to implement new features and helped onboarding two new team members. Additionally, I took part in the agile transition of the team.

Digital Banking was the first team at solarisBank that worked with an agile methodology - namely Scrum. Additionally, we started to bring more disciplines into the team. The vision has been to be able to cover the whole product life cycle end to end within the team.

• increase of test coverage by writing integration tests for a critical part of the Rails application,
• preparation of the platform for the US launch,
• development of features for the administration interface

• payment integration (SEPA, Adaptions to new European tax law),
• implementation of fluentd plugins,
• DynamoDB integration,
• creation of a Ruby DynamoDB Object-Document-Mapper dynameister,
• maintenance and Rails upgrade of the core app from Rails version three to four,
• working on a microservices architecture,
• organization of brownbags

• transferring of features into services,
• integration of external services,
• payment integration,
• general refactorings,
• part time Scrum Master

• development of backend and frontend components for the product “Social Contact Center” in Ruby on Rails and Javascript,
• design and implementation of a REST API for customers,
• organization of the Scrum process

• enhancements of the iPhone and Android clients of the product “App Alert”,
• development of backend and frontend components for the product ”Social Contact Center” in Ruby on Rails

• implementation and maintenance of server-side components in Java,
• implementation of client-side application in Android for the project BeMobility

Focus on communication-based systems

Master's thesis

Social Network Discovery based on User Location Analysis (download)

In this thesis the spatial social context of individuals based on their location data was explored. Additionally, metrics to measure the spatial similarity between individuals were defined. Then, a Social Network which is based on the individuals’ location data and pictures the spatial similarity between them was constructed. Finally, an evaluation of the Social Network was made by applying metrics of Social Network Analysis.

Focus on software development

Bachelor's thesis: Messung der Sprachqualität von VoIP-Verbindungen (download)

In my Bachelor's thesis an introduction to the technology of VoIP was given. Furthermore, the basics for understanding quality in the context of VoIP were explained. Additionally, a server-side application for collecting objective and subjective quality data of VoIP connections for devices of the manufacturer Aastra DeTeWe was developed in Java.