Consultant und Software Engineer

Project: Securing thousands of weekly deploys comes with its challenges. Engineers' peace of mind to deploy with such high rates depends heavily on the quality of the safety net, that automated tests and pipeline feedback span. We identified communication errors as one of the central sources of production incidents. Single-service integration tests cannot catch this type of error. E2E test suites, on the other hand, do not scale with this deployment rate. They are also time-consuming and tedious to maintain.
We decided to build a Contract Testing Platform that can cover virtually all communication errors in production. This is part of an ongoing effort to replace E2E tests with more scalable testing strategies. Today, the Contract Testing Platform validates thousands of service code alterations daily. Engineers rely on the feedback to see if their changes will break any communication patterns in production.

Contribution: I lead the engineering team in extending the Platform as new challenges arise, such as multi-country deployments or supporting novel tech stacks. I analyze the precise requirements together with stakeholders from other Business Units. I drive decision-making through whiteboarding and trade-off analysis. Since the Platform depends on infrastructure from other teams, such as CICD pipelines or the central service registry, I closely coordinate with other engineering teams. I ensure that the rollout happens without service interruption because the Platform has become a crucial piece of the company's value stream. Furthermore,  I implement automated metrics collection to study feature adoption and Platform performance over time.

Methods & Technologies: Contract Tests, Engineering Platform, Clojure, EDN, Plumatic Schema, Tekton, Datomic, HTTP, Kafka, Performance Engineering

Project: For more than two decades, this client has been developing a large application landscape in old-school separated roles: developers, mostly manual operations, and a test team that validates – also by hand. However, complexity has taken over most of the developer's mental capacity. Communication has become a bottleneck and maneuverability is heavily impaired: classic firefighting.

Contribution: Within the scope of this consulting project, I supported my client to start modernizing build, deployment, and testing. The goal was to analyze and study some of the base technologies that would enable a new collaboration model in the future. During a workshop, we determined the best fit for a blueprint project. Further, we discussed important key metrics that can guide them out of complexity.

Methods & Technologies: Docker, Pipeline-Tools, Metrics Collection, Whiteboarding, IT Architecture

Project: The client is a middle-sized enterprise offering an integrated software solution to business customers. The company has a large and stable customer base. They want to accelerate releases, from a couple of scheduled releases per year to shipping often. Starting with frequent automatic deployments and speeding up the whole value stream usually presents a couple of new challenges. There are technical difficulties like an aging tech stack that does not allow for the required flexibility. More importantly, cultural changes are necessary, because such a transformation can feel scary and uncertain. Moving away from well-rehearsed patterns takes courage and requires leaders to produce an environment of psychological safety and absolute tolerance for mistakes.

Contribution: In a team of consultants, I accompany both the technical evolution of our client's engineering team as well as the leaders and managers to build strong teams. I support technological choices concerning automation, pipeline, automated testing, and service orchestration on the target platform. I assist a pioneer team with their first implementation of a Kubernetes platform as an easy deployment target for product teams. I help managers to align their goals and build a useful roadmap to improve the value stream.

Methods & Technologies: Pipeline tooling, Kubernetes, Build and Deployment Automation, Automated Metrics Collection, Psychological Safety Culture