Custom Webdevelopment and Apps

Custom Webdevelopment and Digital Products

I have been working as a freelance software developer since 2011, mainly in web development. As a fullstack developer I do both backend development and frontend development, but I am also available for specialized support in teams. I work remotely as well as on-site in Hamburg. Do you want to develop a new web application or extend it individually, or are you looking for support or consulting for your team? Please feel free to contact me via the contact form!

Services

Concept and technical feasibility

Do you have an idea in mind? I'm happy to help with the technical assessment and conception and give an estimate of time and cost.

Prototyping and MVP (Minimal Viable Product)

I support you in creating a working version of your idea as quickly as possible so that you can test it.

UX/UI and Individual Features

What is the most user-friendly way to implement the desired functionality on the various devices?

Build your product

With modern but proven technologies from prototype to finished, maintainable and expandable product.

Work for hire

As a freelancer either remotely or in Hamburg, Germany, and surrounding areas in the areas of Javascript, UX, Frontend, Ruby on Rails, React.

Cases

Nooshub.com - AI Powered RSS Reader

RSS? Many people will not even know about this technology, although it has existed for so long and brings with it many of the good qualities of the "old" Internet - the openness to share content without being locked up on one platform.

Today, however, there is a lot of content, in contrast to the beginnings when bloggers published content on a weekly basis. Machine learning and a.k.a. artificial intelligence (AI) are the perfect solution for taming this amount of content. AI needs large amounts of data to reach its full potential.

The area of AI that deals with language is called NLP - Natural Language Processing. The RSS reader "Nooshub" uses NLP techniques to sort articles by content. It "reads" huge amounts of content and represents words mathematically as best as possible, in order to be able to sort new articles in real time.

This allows you to detect trends and duplicates in your news feeds, so you can get a quick overview of the news situation and don't have to skim similar articles several times.

No user data is required, only the content of the news is used. Likewise, nothing is filtered, so that one receives transparently all subscribed news to get a picture.

NDR Ticketshop Relaunch

As the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg was slowly approaching its opening, the online NDR ticket store, where tickets for the Elbphilharmonie can be purchased, was also to be newly implemented.

Since the store must also be able to cope with virtual rushes, great importance was attached to performance. The attached store is based on the Eventim System. The CMS is a solution adapted to the needs of the editorial staff, which works with Ruby on Rails and PostgreSql.

Technology

Frontend Development

For frontend the choice of the right technology can save a lot of time. Depending on the interactivity of the app everything from vanilla JS to full blown single page app is possible. For that I use React.js, maybe together with Redux and Typescript. Connecting the backend can be done with a classic REST api, maybe with OpenApi specification, or with GraphQL.
CSS is a powerful language that keeps evolving - variables, flex box and grid make complex layouts easier to achieve. With SCSS it becomes even more powerful and faster to write.

Backend Development

Ruby on Rails the technology of my choice regarding web app development. It is a mature framework with a great community that enables fast development and ties everything together, from building the prototype to the final product.

For machine learning applications Python is the natural choice. Many solid libraries from the fields of statistics, math and AI algorithms already exist and are ready to be used for your next app.

When extra performance is needed, GO is the language to... ähhh... go. It is simple, a snap to deploy, blazingly fast, has a big community behind it and a funny logo - what more can you ask?

Most apps need a database, there are many databases that do one thing great, PostgreSql is up to any task from full text search to storage of complex structures. From scaling to backups it is a well thought out open source project.

Infrastructure

Last but not least the carefully crafted app needs to live somewhere. I use Capistrano for deployment, Ubuntu as server, Chef for server management and increasingly often Docker for development.

Other

Sometimes I build apps for iOS and macOS with Swift and Objective-C. I also build Audio Apps as a hobby, for example the chromatic tuner LunaTuna and the macOS system equalizer Vizzdom.

How I work

New Projects

Web development is a complex mix of many different technologies to master. The starting point of a project is therefore to answer the question of which technologies can be used to achieve the goal.

Over the past few years, a technology stack has emerged for my projects, with which the vast majority of web projects can be scaled, maintained and performed with high performance.

From choosing the right hosting to avoiding SaaS subscriptions, I always keep an eye on spending, and put special emphasis on modular, interchangeable blocks in the software architecture.

This principle allows you to start small and scale as needed while having a maintainable application. Greenlandic projects are a welcome opportunity to embrace best practices and create an application that will serve you for years to come, as well as being easily maintained, possibly by other teams.

Working on complex web projects requires regular feedback. Only in this way can large projects be implemented to the satisfaction of the customer (agile work).

Legacy Code

Many successful web applications have grown historically over the years. Working on such a project is certainly a different challenge than the new development, but it comes down to gradually introducing the principles of modularity mentioned under the point of new development.

This can be a very tedious process that requires a lot of caution. Existing good automated tests are a prerequisite, and may need to be created first.