My name is Simon.

I’m a visionary for product engineering and a pragmatist in writing code. Ever since my studies I’ve been inspired by the expressive power of computer science. Numerous processes from the physical world can be simplified with a digital product. The computer is our tool to start realizing them at low cost. It’s fine if it fails on the first attempt. With an iterative process, constant feedback from users, and data-driven observations, we can validate our idea early and regularly and improve our development process organically.

During my 9 years as a professional full-stack developer I got the chance to move to the beautiful city of Lisbon. On top of my daily coding time in various projects I became a mentor for new hires. For each new Portuguese colleague I had to come up with an optimal strategy for their onboarding. The key to my success was being patient enough to understand their level of knowledge first. I wanted to understand whether they were a top-down or a bottom-up learner. Then I thought of different ways to explain a subject and visualize it so that my mentee could actively dive into the complexity of a big software system. It makes me happy when people succeed with my support. And it’s also selfish: I feel my own knowledge deepen every time I share it.

The conclusion for working on software in teams for a while now is straightforward: If a culture of conveying know-how to teammates prevails, even complex software projects will succeed, simply because everyone stays motivated and operates at the edge of the team’s proficiency.

For the craft of coding, I support the following credos:

• Explicit is better than implicit

• Simple is better than complex

• Complex is better than complicated

Download my one-page resume.

Technology that I use and still like

The only cliche about programmers that holds true for me is my adoration of coffee. I usually enjoy a Flat White I produce manually with my old-school Bialetti. Definitely a good start to a high-motivation day spent using some of these technologies:

Rust	My daily driver for the past 4 years. I’m the main contributor to the Acurast indexer and an active contributor to the Acurast blockchain itself — Rust’s type system and zero-cost abstractions let me ship infrastructure I can actually trust under load.
Go	3 years daily building microservices in production. Go’s minimal surface area and outstanding standard library make it the language I reach for when a system needs to be boring, fast, and obvious to the next engineer who reads it. I consider myself an expert and still enjoy writing it.
Python & Django	My tool of choice when speed of iteration matters: Django powers my own SaaS product Contentnuance, and Jupyter / Pandas power my scientific work and ad-hoc scripting. Nothing beats Python’s ecosystem when you need to prototype an idea or glue existing systems together.
Docker & Kubernetes	My go-to stack for products that need to scale with the team, not just the traffic. The trick to long-term velocity is committing to incrementally deployable micro-/macro-services from day one — clean APIs between services, deliberate boundaries to the outside world, and a careful integration with the cloud’s built-in primitives. Three years of running this in production taught me how to make it a rock-solid deployment strategy rather than an operational liability.
Google Cloud & Microsoft Azure (managed with Terraform)	I’ve shipped multi-region workloads on both clouds, with a staged deployment pipeline (minimum three environments) and automated tests that keep production safe across continuous releases. I led the infrastructure work that enabled end-to-end system tests across multiple services — both against deployed environments and inside CI.
PostgreSQL	Some classics earn their place. For the vast majority of problems — even inside distributed microservice architectures — one or several PostgreSQL databases remain the cleanest, most reliable way to organize your data.
Flutter	I helped build a stock-receipt management platform paired with a Flutter app used daily by thousands of employees. As code owner of the distributed, offline-capable authentication flow I owned its security, and I designed the asynchronous data-sync mechanics that kept large reference datasets consistent in the field. I’m currently using Flutter again on a pet project aimed at making food production transparent for consumers.
ReactJS	My default when starting a new web frontend from scratch. This site itself runs on Astro — a modern static-site generator that lets me write posts in plain Markdown while still dropping into React components wherever interactivity is worth the weight.
AngularJS	I use it at my current job to build parts of the Acurast Hub.
Java EE	I built a visual configurator with Java Swing and custom extensions during my internship at Ergon. At freiheit.com I then used Spring Boot to ship a customizable search for one of the largest real-estate companies world-wide.

My work stack

Text Editor	Visual Studio Code and sometimes IDEs from Jet Brains
Terminal	Oh my Zsh
Computer	MacBook Pro / Thinkpad X1 Carbon Gen 8 (with Linux)
Keyboard	The self-soldered version of an Ergodox EZ Mechanical Keyboard
UI Design	Pen & blank paper, sometimes Figma
Headphones	I love silence at work, but I do play the violine or the guitar when I need a virtuosic break.
Inspiration	This I get from mindful Yoga breaks or by having a swim in the beautiful atlantic ocean.

The site is hosted on GitLab Pages.