About
Professional developer since 2001. AWS Community Builder since 2021.
25 years from pixel to pipeline. Started in design agencies turning PSDs into HTML, built and led a 35-person dev team, ran multi-account AWS infrastructure at scale – and now build the CLIs, MCP servers and agents that teams and AI run on.
Automation is my core craft. AI makes producing code cheap; what still matters is knowing which process to automate, where the edge cases hide, and how a tool feels to the person – or the agent – using it. That’s where the agency years pay off: I design tooling like a product.
I take ownership – of projects, problems and solutions.
AI-native development: spec-driven development with agentic coding tools (Claude Code, OpenCode) – and I build the tooling those agents use: MCP servers, CLIs, skills, hooks, GitHub Actions.
Go is my preferred language. TypeScript and Python where they fit. Bash hero, Makefile ninja.
Can lead, want to code.
I do the full stack:
- AI tooling – MCP servers, agent skills/plugins, CLIs for humans and agents
- Infrastructure as code – AWS CDK, CloudFormation, Terraform
- Automation & CI/CD – GitHub Actions, GitLab Pipelines, AWS CodePipeline
- Application / Service / Microservice design
- Front- and backend development
- Observability – Metrics, logging, tracing
- Containers & serverless – for development, testing, CI and prod
- DB schema design – PostgreSQL, MySQL
- Server administration & virtualization
As important as code is documentation: my code ships with an owner’s and user’s manual.
Fully remote since 2013, always in widely distributed teams.
Stack Overflow: 61k reputation, long-time #1 answerer for Ansible (still top 5 all-time), top 5% for git, Docker, ssh, Jinja2, CSS… – written back when humans still answered each other’s questions.
Technologies I want to work with: TypeScript, Go, Rust, AWS, AWS CDK, Serverless, Bash, Claude Code, AI agents, Automation, Docker
Open Source & AI Tooling
Tools I build and maintain – for developers, for myself, and increasingly for AI agents. Most ship as SDK + CLI + MCP server, so humans and agents use the same interface.
- IAM Floyd – AWS IAM policy statement generator with a fluent interface – for TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, C# and Go. Covers every AWS service, updated automatically.
- cfn-teleport – Rust CLI for moving CloudFormation resources across and within stacks without recreating them.
- cdk-ec2-key-pair – AWS CDK L3 construct for managing EC2 key pairs.
- Avanti – Stateful package manager for arbitrary text files: declare what you need and where to get it; Avanti fetches, diffs and writes with full version history, atomic rollbacks and diff-before-apply safety.
- boarding-gate – GitHub Action that queues workflow runs so only one at a time uses shared resources – ordered by PR labels, without cancelling pending runs, aware of auto-merge and outdated branches.
- Ansible Silo – Self-contained, drop-in Ansible distribution in Docker: version manager and playbook bundler in one. Built and open-sourced at Groupon (2017).
- anton – Node.js SDK, CLI, MCP server and Agent Skill for the anton.app learning platform.
- duolingo – Duolingo SDK, CLI and MCP server.
- lanis – SDK, CLI and MCP server for Schulportal Hessen (Lanis).
- dsbmobile – SDK, CLI and MCP server for DSBmobile – German school substitution plans.
- switch-parental-controls – CLI and MCP server exposing Nintendo Switch Parental Controls as commands and AI-accessible tools.
- reminders-cli – CLI for Apple Reminders on macOS: JSON output, batch edits, repeating reminders, Homebrew install. Also available as a Claude Code plugin.
Experiences
- Building AI agents, MCP servers and agent skills for Jira, GitLab and internal DB systems – putting agentic workflows into daily operations
- Replaced Ansible Tower with a custom serverless automation platform on AWS SSM, Lambda and ECS/Fargate (after first building an autoscaling Ansible Tower cluster)
- Managing GitLab runner infrastructure, build environments and CI/CD pipelines for 300+ projects
- Migrated Ansible and CloudFormation IaC to AWS CDK
- Molecule test coverage for ~300 Ansible roles and playbooks
- Managing SAP infrastructure in AWS; responsible for AWS account and system security
- Managed all company AWS accounts and baseline configuration via Terraform/Terragrunt
- Established a modular, extendable tooling framework based on Terragrunt, aws-okta, tfenv, Terraform Landscape and a lot of Makefile – so teams could start quickly with robust, secure multi-account IaC
- Designed and built multi-account/multi-environment Terraform CI/CD system based on AWS API Gateway, Lambda, Fargate, DynamoDB and S3
- VM provisioning, management and user support (KVM/QEMU/Virsh)
- Developed Go microservices for the complete VM lifecycle (request, approval, allocation, deployment, migration, deletion) – libvirt, Go kit, GORM, PostgreSQL
- Go-based VM console tool: opens SSH tunnels to VM hosts and connects to the VNC port, for troubleshooting VMs that have no SSH access
- Manually migrated and enhanced graphs and dashboards for 23 services from legacy in-house graphing tool to VMware Wavefront
- Built a package repository cache (CentOS/RPM incl. EPEL/ELRepo, plus Debian and FreeBSD): automated upstream syncing, snapshot tagging for reproducible installs (“infrastructure versioning”), custom package uploads, ZFS replication across 3 data centers – based on mrepo, FreeNAS, Python tooling and Ansible
- Containerized applications to make builds, tests and deployments faster and more reliable (Docker)
- Automated image building via Jenkins pipelines
- Invented Ansible Silo (open source, Groupon) – self-contained, drop-in Ansible distribution in Docker: version manager and playbook bundler in one
- Built “Redis as a Service”: large-scale, highly available, rack-aware Redis clusters with configurable shards and replication rings – based on Redis Sentinel and twemproxy/nutcracker, lifecycle management via Ansible
- Built a tooling framework for Ansible 1.3 that added features Ansible itself only introduced with version 2 – including Galaxy-like role distribution with plugin support
- Set up an internal Ansible Galaxy hub and wrote a complete role set for managing CentOS 6/7 systems: DNS/Named, NTP, sshd, network interfaces (bonding, bridges), users, kernel settings, log rotation, log forwarding to Splunk and metrics forwarding to Nagios
- Ansible callback plugins for sending events to Nagios, automatic downtime and chat notifications
- Serverspec test suites for Ansible roles
- Managed global Splunk infrastructure with ~200 indexers and 20+ TB daily indexing volume
- Supported Splunk users with scheduled searches and dashboards; reviewed and optimized searches
- Wrote custom Ruby plugins for Splunk searches
- Managed updates and custom app distribution through Splunk Deployment Server
- Built and led a PHP development team from scratch, growing it to 35 developers
- Designed and built PHP applications based on Zend Framework for Groupon’s high-traffic platform
- Technical lead for GrouponShop, the jobs, blog and premium-partner systems, and all online-marketing applications: landing pages, AdWords real-time bidding, newsletter, tracking and ad systems
- Created websites for various customers, mostly based on webEdition and Drupal
- Set up, configured and themed forum, blog and shop systems
- Developed PHP applications and modules for Drupal, webEdition and Magento
- Built HTML/CSS templates from PSD designs
- Contract work for agencies: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and CMS projects (mostly webEdition)
- Built HTML/CSS templates from PSD designs
- Vocational training as Fachinformatiker Anwendungsentwicklung (German IT specialist certification, application development)
- Developed web applications based on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML, PHP, web services and databases (MySQL, Xindice, Tamino)
- Built websites based on content management systems (eZ Publish, Imperia 5)
- Supervised children and teenagers in the internet café “Globales Lokal”
- Administered SuSE Linux clients
- First hands-on HTML and PHP, maintaining the website of “Globales Lokal”
- Taught beginner HTML classes to kids