After seven years at Smart Commerce SE and helping the company grow from around 20 employees to more than one hundred, I decided it was time for a new chapter. Our client planned to bring the project in-house, as these kinds of projects always eventually do, but I wanted to keep working on the Förch eCommerce solution. So, together with two colleagues, I stayed in the project and took on the broader role of architecting the unified software landscape for the company. With that we started the new in-house development team at Förch.
Since then, I have taken over most of the cloud hosting, except for the SAP Commerce Cloud middleware hosted directly by SAP and built a stronger foundation for our growing fleet of microservices. I also expanded the in-house team to cover both frontend/app and backend development, started offering hosting and development services to other teams across the company, and continued our work of gradually moving from a monolithic system toward a microservice architecture.
During my time at Smart Commerce I worked for various clients, developing eCommerce solutions using the SAP Commerce Cloud middleware. My first project was for a client in the wholesale and automotive industry. I was embedded into the in house developing team for about 3 years. My work included DevOps tasks, feature development, support, and training of new team members.
My second project at Smart Commerce was working for the Theo Förch GmbH & Co. KG as the tech lead for a new eCommerce solution build again on SAP Commerce Cloud as a greenfield project. In parallel to the monolithic main application, we developed multiple microservices realizing dedicated features like eProcurement or hazardous substance management. We were also responsible for the ongoing operations of the application.
I wrapped up my degree with a six-month internship at Quadrolux, a video and graphics agency in Mainz. In this time, I created motion graphics for television shows like ZDF Zoom and Frontal 21 as well as promotional content for a variety of corporate clients. Towards the end of my internship, I moved towards developing software and scripts helping in our production workflow. That included plugins for Cinema4D and After Effects.
After this internship I decided to pursue a career in software development.
I started my professional journey with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, specializing in interactive entertainment and video games. During this time, I acquired skills in using industry standard tools like Autodesk Maya, NUKE, the Adobe Suite, and other tools. I also started to improve my developing skills while working with game engines like CryEngine and Unreal Engine. My thesis was on workload balancing in distributed rendering systems. My goal was to explore how real time rendering workloads can be distributed on multiple processing units or GPUs while balancing the compute needed for distribution and efficient resource utilization.