I have been a software developer and engineering leader for more than 2 decades and still am the proud open source maintainer of the awesome Reek gem. I have spent almost all of my professional life in international startups with a strong focus on engineering culture and productivity. I excel at building the right teams with the right culture and then scale them up as the business grows.
- Coding & Mentoring (I do like pair programming)
- Leadership coaching
- Goal setting both on a team level and on a department-wide scale
- Strategic initiatives, e.g. career development, career ladder, technical and managerial initiatives across the engineering department
- Team building
- Boosting team productivity and happiness
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Excellence in software engineering. I’m obsessed with code quality and writing elegant, maintainable code. I am a regular open source contributor and maintainer of a couple of more or less popular Ruby gems. Most notably of the awesome Reek gem - check out my github profile for more. Additionally you can find quite a few mostly technical articles on my blog.
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Building up teams by recruiting the best people. I'd go as far as to say that team play is 10 times more important than "being an expert" since it's far easier to become good at something than transitioning from being a "Rockstar developer" to somebody who can carry and motivate a team. You can read up on my recruiting philosophy here.
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Motivation and the passion to motivate others: I believe that vision and purpose on the high level, clear responsibilities and maximum autonomy are the keys to high productivity and happiness.
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The passion to create something that might change the world.
- Languages: There's hardly a language I can't find anything positive about it. I have worked with a lot of dynamic languages like Ruby, PHP, Python, javascript and static languages like Java. I also like esoteric languages like brainf**k or whitespace for the fun of it.
- Databases: Over the course of the years I have worked with good old SQL databases (PostgreSQL, mySQL), NoSQL databases (Redis and friends) and Big Data databases (Hbase / Hadoop).
- I spent the majority of my career focusing on backend development (mostly API / SOA environments) but have spent enough time in frontend and mobile development to know my way around.
- In terms of cloud computing, I have had my fair share of the big ones - Google, AWS, Azure. My personal preference is Google Cloud and if you don't need the horsepower, I'd almost always give the nod to heroku, which I consider an awesome alternative for small to medium startups.
Our team of sustainability experts support food manufacturers, agricultural commodity traders, financial institutions, NGOs and government agencies to understand their land conversion risks and reduction opportunities using best-available data. We do a lot of big data crunching using Python and Google Cloud.
Consulting startups across all stages of growth. In smaller startups this usually means hands-on coding, in bigger ones my role is often close or equal to that of an interim CTO focusing on leadership coaching, goal setting, strategic initiatives and team building.
Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. Top companies rely on Toptal freelancers for their most important projects. I was responsible for all product related development teams (around 150 developers, 25 teams) and making sure that we build the right things at the right time.
Planet, Berlin (Germany)
Planet builds, ships and operates the biggest satellite fleet in the history of mankind. As director of software engineering I was responsible for building and scaling the software engineering team, develop new and innovative analytical products on top of our vasts amount of data and maintaining our existing production systems. Planet has a strong philanthropic aspect to everything it does and we're always helping communities and researchers to make use of our data in the best way possible.
Blacklane, Berlin (Germany)
Blacklane is a ride-hailing service that is working world wide with the highest aspirations in regards to quality and customer satisfaction. As director of software engineering I was responsible for scaling the team from 10 to 30 developers, change the underlying architecture to be more microservice focused and evangelize new technologies and clean code conventions.
A lot of freelancing in the Berlin startup eco system mostly working with dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Javascript.
There are many inspirations and inspirational people in my life:
- I am a (terrible) hobby mathematician with some of my idols being Euclid, Srinivasa Ramanujan and John Horton Conway for the Monstrous moonshine conjecture.
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I'm fascinated by the early 20th century, which means more or less everybody that attended the 1927 Solvay conference, Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Nils Bohr, Marie Curie...
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Psychologists and motivational speakers like Tony Robbins or Carol Dweck
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Inventors like Nikola Tesla or Thomas Edison
My favourite inspirational quote is from Aaron Swartz:
Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.
Playing videogames with my daughter is certainly one of my favorite pastimes. When I'm not doing that I'm flying an aircraft or at least trying to - I'm currently in the process of getting my pilot licence. I'm hoping to buy a beautiful Cirrus SR22 or an Extra 300 so I can visit each country on this planet by flying there with my own aircraft.
Other than that I have been training Brazilian jiu-jitsu for quite a few years now and still do so. And finally, I love math and physics and am studying math on the side being enrolled in a remote university.
- One of my most recent activities was giving introductory programming lessons to female immigrants in refugee camps for the ReDi school in Berlin.
- I still regularly mentor and coach the kids I taught in the programming classes above.
- I used to volunteer as a German teacher for refugees at the Offene Tuer.
- I help out occasionally at the Berliner Obdachlosenhilfe handing out food to homeless people.
- I have a Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005.
- I am currently studying mathematics on the side with the final goal of getting a PHD.
Mail: timo.roessner [at] gmail.com