thomas menzel

This little site shall serve as my freelancer webpage in order to give some basic info about my professional self to the world (more specifically: customers).

It started all when I was 11 years old on my C16 (dont’t laugh), continued in my youth on an Amiga (GFA Basic with recursive Assembler sub-routines) and then as a student of computer science and electrical engineering with Java v1.0 back in 1997.

From that on I have had the opportunity to work, even during my student years, in real-world projects in which I have covered all hands-on roles in software development:

• technical project or team lead

• analysis and writing specs

• designing solution architectures

• coding, build, deployment, and testing

• application support

Having been in these roles and understanding their needs and requirements from firsthand experience, I bring an end-to-end approach and view to software development that has severed me and my customers well. My key principles are:

• begin with the end in mind, i.e. having a goal or spec is key (yes, even in Agile this is a must IMO)

• verify that you reached that goal - during development with unit test and for the whole solution with automated E2E tests.

Designing solutions (i.e. algorithms, processes, the micro- and macro architecture, …) to solve problems and bringing them to life with coding is what I enjoy the most. My focus here is “all things backend” (e.g. DB model, REST APIs, …​), but I have also dipped my toes into the waters of UI when the need arose.

Sharpening the saw is a vital virtue of every craftsman and so I constantly look out to improve my skills and tool belt and invest in learning new technologies and tools. So far I have not had a project where I did not have to learn something new, either on the job or which triggered me to study up on it in my free time.

Please refer to my CV and the skill matrix for a more in-depth look on what I can do for your project.

Working in a team with other professionals is a great way to learn from each other and come through discussions to a better understanding and thus solutions. This to me is a core principle of Agile Development and I have been blessed to have always been in projects that adhered to that culture to some degree, even when not being officially “Agile.”

Helping each other out in a team goes without saying and is paramount to me. The same goes for the project at large, in fact, I understand my role as a freelancer to help the project team to deliver. Being somewhat a Jack of All Trades, I find myself often filling in the skill gaps of the team when I rather prefer just developing a feature.

I believe that I am open in my communication which is quite content oriented and often direct and straight to the core of a problem. I have no need to follow hidden agendas and do politics in my projects because I want to get things done, so in a sense I’m WYSYWIG.

I live with my family near Hannover, Germany.

Despite being German I prefer writing in English – so much simpler! Hence this site is in EN b/c:

1. I expect that those who are professionally interested are capable of reading this

2. It saves me the trouble of providing all of this in two languages

Speaking of making things simple: I love to abbreviate and write, in small letters (+1 for EN over DE). So, bare this in mind when reading this site. It’s not due to to incompetence (mostly).