Profile

Hi! I'm Markus, a versatile freelance software engineer with a focus on – but not at all limited to – game back-end development.

Within that role, I'm a seasoned amateur in many fields, and always aiming to strike a good balance between making things work quickly, and keeping them maintainable for the long haul. Taking responsibility in all phases of the software lifecycle, including operations, has always felt natural to me (way before DevOps became a word).

Hire Me!

If you have a project that I might be able to help you with, please get in touch! I'm happy to negotiate rates based on project scope and budget, and generally more excited about doing interesting work than making a fortune.

I am based in Munich, Germany, and experienced with working remotely.

Recent Projects

Here's a selection of things I have been working on in the past couple of years. Feel free to have a look at my traditional CV for more details about these, and about earlier work.

TheNextWe/TheNextMe

2017 - 2019
A platform for life and business coaching as a digital service

Designed and implemented the REST API backing a mobile app and webapp, providing realtime chat, appointment scheduling functionality and various types of content material (surveys, exercise modules, audio/video) to clients and their coaches.

Implemented core parts of the administrative webapp, using React-admin.

Also helped out refactoring and extending the React/React Native+Redux based clients.

Hexxle

2016
A tile shifting puzzle game for Android

An interim solo project: Built a simple puzzle game using the libGDX framework, with a deliberately narrow scope, in order to improve client-side skills and exercise an entire app development cycle within a limited amount of time (4 months from idea/prototype to release).

LOCLET

2015 - 2016
A location based trivia game for smartphones

Designed and implemented the horizontally scalable back-end service/REST API that managed player data and provided core game functionality to the Android and iOS clients.

As part of a nimble startup team, I also took care of a significant portion of the infrastructure setup and maintenance work (CI/CD environments, operations monitoring etc), and contributed to game design extensions and new features beyond the initial project scope.

Eleven Giants

2014 - 2017
An open source project reviving a unique collaborative MMO game

Eleven Giants is a community-driven open source project aiming to bring the previously shut down commercial MMO game Glitch back to life.

As time permits, I am contributing to these efforts as part of a globally distributed team of volunteers. This primarily means extending the Node-based game server that provides the persistent realtime game environment, and provisioning and maintaining various parts of the infrastructure.

Skills and Capabilities

My primary areas of expertise are Javascript/Node.js and Java, but I have also worked professionally with C#/.NET and Python. Whatever technology I happen to be using, I try to fully understand its core ideas and not go against the grain.

Other notable topics, emphasized roughly corresponding to my proficiency with them:

Akka Android Appium AWS Braintree Debian Docker ESLint Flow Git Graphite+StatsD Hapi Heroku Jenkins JSON Schema Koa MongoDB Mongoose MySQL nginx React React Native Redis Redux Redux-Saga REST APIs RethinkDB Sentry Spring Twilio Unit testing Vagrant