Patrick

Hello! I’m Patrick.

After a well needed and refreshing break I am looking for my next full-time gig in a creative and open-minded team building the next sustainable big thing located in the Munich area or remote.

I consider myself a generalist in web development who loves to work at the front of the frontend with a strong focus on the human side, doing everything from forming a concept to drafting low- and high-fidelity mockups and designs to crafting semantic, performant and systematic HTML and CSS templates, collaborating cross-discipline to deliver top-notch long-living experiences.

So let’s have a chat about how I can help your company right away!

Find out more about what I can bring to the table, where I have gained experience in professional and private projects and what I am up to in my spare time.

Skills

Over the course of the past 24 years working with computers and on the web I have worked on countless diverse projects and have amassed and refined vast and partly deep knowledge in various, mostly internet-related fields. My focus and passion has always been the web but I was never shy to expand my horizon and to try out new things.

My broad skillset helps me in assessing the complexity of a given assignment and finding the right people to solve it. I thrive under pressure by collaborating and communicating with other interdisciplinary team members to successfully achieve the common goal.

I can bring ideas to life quickly by roughing them out on paper, drawing and prototyping them in Sketch and Photoshop, refining and iterating the designs directly in the code.

Although I define myself as a web development generalist, thus not being the best in just one niche (Hello, impostor syndrome!), I write fluent HTML and CSS in its latest rendition with the desired level of backwards compatibility based on the audience. I know concepts like progressive enhancement and mobile first by heart and how and when to use them.

Alas, a lot of the things I learned I have already forgotten again due to it being outdated or me not actively using it any more.

Expert

  • German
  • HTML
  • CSS
  • English

Pro

  • LESS CSS
  • Responsive Design
  • Mobile First
  • Progressive Enhancement
  • semantic code
  • SCSS
  • team-minded
  • working in teams
  • working independently
  • Schema.org Microdata
  • Adobe Photoshop
  • performant websites
  • communicative
  • Sketch
  • accepting criticism
  • giving constructive criticism
  • Design Systems
  • quality conscious
  • thirst for knowledge
  • target-oriented
  • browser dev-tools
  • trustworthy
  • enthusiastic
  • eager to learn
  • proactive
  • organizational talent
  • Agile Scrum
  • Agile Kanban
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Adobe Indesign
  • Microformats

Intermediate

  • SmaCSS
  • BEM
  • PostCSS
  • GIT
  • Twig
  • Bavarian
  • Atomic Design
  • Adobe Flash
  • VS Code
  • SublimeText

Beginner

  • Accessibility
  • Spanish
  • Adobe Premiere
  • Adobe Audition
  • Italian
  • Bootstrap
  • Javascript
  • vueJS
  • PHP
  • SQL
  • XML

Archived == more or less forgotten

  • AMP
  • phpBB Templating
  • Techsmith Camtasia
  • Techsmith Morae
  • LaTeX
  • Murx 3.0
  • Java
  • Velocity
  • Wicket
  • nine-to-five
  • SVN
  • Quark Xpress
  • C
  • UML
  • Shell-Scripting
  • ActionScript
  • Macromedia Flash
  • Macromedia Director
  • CVS
  • WAP / WML
  • analog Cromalin Proof Printing
  • Macromedia Freehand
  • CorelDraw
  • DHTML
  • Macromedia Fireworks
  • PaintShop Pro
  • VHS digitizing
  • Latin

Experience

Having worked professionally full-time in small- and medium-sized teams in the past 15 years I had many web-, design- and product-related hats on throughout the various projects. Depending on the task and project, I worked alone or in pairs with permanent or changing team members.

From greenfield projects to large legacy code bases, from monolithic applications to microservices architecture, from brand new tech stacks to years old code bases, from starting up to maintaining, I’ve worked on all kinds of projects. Along the way I’ve learned when to use proven techniques, frameworks and libraries and when there is room for improvement by building your own solution. Regardless of that, I am allergic to ‘it was ever thus.’ Developer convenience is nice but it should never get a higher importance than the user experience.

I am not a Fullstack-Developer by any chance but I know my way around a given code base pretty quickly and can easily adapt to different languages and coding guidelines. I have worked on code bases with the backend in Java, PHP and most recently vueJS running with the likes of FTP, Ant, Gulp, Grunt, Make, npm and Webpack.

I like working in agile managed environments (Kanban, SCRUM, SCRUMbut) in close collaboration with project managers and product owners where I can prioritize my tasks independently. I really hate being micromanaged and agonize about decisions based on opportunism. I have no problem in owning my failures and like to see this attribute in others, too.

Since October 2018 I had the honour to lead and mentor a (kind of diverse) team of up to 5 junior and senior designers, covering a wide range from print and media designer to web designer to UX designer. I established regular 1on1s and team meetings and did all the things a team lead usually does.

Job references are available upon request.

  1. My next full-time gig

    –open end

    Munich area or remote

    I am looking for a new full-time job in a company working on the web. Bonus points if your product intends to make the world a better place (climate, sustainability, health, ...). I am open to focus and role, but I want to help shaping your project and the overall experience around your project with my expertise in product development, designing and coding. Having had my first experience with a pandemic and being a team lead, I want to focus working on a product for now. I can imagine flowing into a leadership role again at some point.

    I want to collaborate in a creative, open-minded and preferably diverse team with unique experiences. Although as a white male german I can’t really add in appearance to this diversity, but I will do my very best to be as welcoming and inclusive as possible myself. I am open on starting a greenfield project or joining in with an existing project, working in a company that is just starting up or is already well established.

    Working from home (part-time or at least flexible working hours) should not be an issue (especially now during the pandemic) as I would like my wife to pursue her career as a teacher. Plus I want to be there for my kids and see them from time to time.

    I am always eager to learn new things—on my own or from others. Hence you should offer some kind of training budget for attending conferences and proactively promote the exchange of knowledge within the team and the company.

    I love skiing and all things wintersport, so it’ll be a major plus if your company holds annual team events on the slopes.

    Already ticking boxes?

    Great! Let’s have a chat!

    Not sure you meet 100% of these qualifications?

    Let’s have a chat anyway!

  2. Team Leader Design

    –

    BörseGo AG, Munich, Germany

    In parallel to working as a web designer BörseGo gave me the opportunity to lead a talented team of up to 5 members of staff covering a wide range from print and media designer to web designer to UX designer, who were all working in different ventures within the company. One aim of my role was to foster the cross-project collaboration on topics like branding, design systems, functional principles and overall customer experience for every touch point.

    • technical and disciplinary leadership responsibility for up to 5 colleagues
    • personnel development, conducting the feedback conversations, organisational support of the hiring procedure and onboarding of new staff
    • scheduling and absence management of the department
    • close collaboration with C-levels and the other departments
    • initiation and management of department events and off-sites for advanced training, strategic alignment and advancement of cross-project teamwork

  3. Senior Webdesigner

    –

    BörseGo AG, Munich, Germany

    My main project from day one at BörseGo has been the GodmodeTrader news website. I have since then executed and was responsible for a major revolutionary redesign (from co-concepting to drafts to mockups to frontend code), a responsive retrofitting and various site wide design iterations to further improve the user experience with the focus on readability, performance and ease of use of the website.

    In addition I worked on countless big and small features, landing pages, tweaks and bugfixes as I was the sole designer and frontend developer for this project. Through implementing a lot of best practices for search engine optimization I helped gaining new customers and fostering the metrics.

    Project: GodmodeTrader (2013 - 2021)

    • website for stock market news, stock analysis, instrument information
    • responsible for branding, usability, design, HTML (started with TWIG HTML, later on vueJS components) and CSS (started with LESS CSS, later on SCSS)
    • worked as a single designer in a team of 3-6 with PM, Backend JS and Backend PHP
    • close collaboration with other departments and stakeholders to include their needs and better align the company goals
    • helped boosting monthly reach from 0.7m uniques, 3.5m visits to 1.3m uniques, 5.5m visits
    • redesigned and reprogrammed the dated platform from the ground up to be maintainable again (2013–2014)
    • retrofitted the website to be mobile-friendly and responsive, adding many new features along the way to stay up-to-date with the latest finance news (2015–2016)
    • iterated and tweaked the website design a few times to among other things enhance readability and overall site performance, which led to faster pages, reduced load times and decreased operating costs
    • helped porting pages and segments from PHP to vueJS, while switching from LESS to SCSS and from a desktop-first to a mobile-first approach, alongside establishing a new design language (2019–2021)
    • vetoed against building an AMP site solely for SEO purposes

    Project: GodmodePLUS (started as GodmodePRO) (2018 - 2021)

    • a subscription-based membership service for GodmodeTrader to gain digital access to additional exclusive articles with a headstart
    • co-concepted possible touch points and user flow on the website
    • designed logos and created accompanying marketing material

    Project: BilligerHandeln (2018)

    • website to receive kickbacks for setting up bank accounts and trading stocks via Guidants
    • responsible for corporate identity, site design and accompanying e-mail templates, user flows, usability and frontend code of the marketing and account pages
    • style and appearance should differ to those currently used by BörseGo and its other brands
    • designed and created branding and logo
    • designed and implemented web components using Sketch, HTML and SCSS on a custom nodeJS framework

    Selection of further projects and efforts

    As we were a small team of 3 to 6 designers I also worked on various other projects over time. Those projects covered a wide range of tasks and included crafting and optimizing websites, creating e-mail templates, designing print works, creating assets for interior design and optimizing workflows.

    • GuidantsTrading — a subsidiary of BörseGo; rebuilt site with focus on semantic HTML, performance, SEO and easy maintainability
    • MarketVectors — client work; built page templates with HTML & CSS for underlying PHP Laravel code according to client’s drafts
    • ChartingUI — fully customizable white-label solution to view and analyze stock market charts; designed the interface and built HTML & LESS CSS for components based on a custom nodeJS framework
    • Article Mailer — reworked HTML e-mail templates to be fully responsive and to work in every mailbox
    • introduced various process optimizations to reduce manual work when composing PDF publications

  4. Frontend Engineer

    –

    amiando AG, München, Deutschland

    During my time at amiando the company grew from 15 to around 100 employees, me being one of only two webdesigners. As I already worked on various other job-related projects while writing my diploma thesis it was a seamless transition from being a graduand to being a full-time employee.

    Together with my colleague I was responsible for the corporate identity, the design and the implementation of every touchpoint of the company ranging from the event websites, the event administration area, the marketing website to printed marketing material and trade show stand. Furthermore I was the technical contact person for the integration of event pages and the implementation of the TicketShop API on client websites.

    In 2011 amiando got acquired by XING AG (nowadays known as NEW WORK SE) and renamed to XING Events GmbH after my departure in 2013.

  5. Diplom-Ingenieur Medien­informatik (FH)

    –

    FH Gießen-Friedberg, Friedberg, Germany

    Over the nine semesters at the University of Applied Sciences Gießen-Friedberg I gained a broad knowledge on many different computer related topics. I was taught design and programming principles, which I used in practice in various labs and university projects. Besides the web technologies I already knew I got experience among other things in Flash ActionScript PHP SQL Java C++ audio editing video editing

    Award for Diploma Thesis

    Friedrich Dessauer Preis des VDE – Verband der Elektrotechnik Elektronik Informationstechnik e.V.

    Subjects included (selection)
    • Gestaltungsgrundlagen
    • Mediengestaltung 1 + 2
    • Medienpsychologie
    • Web Publishing
    • Software Engineering 1
    • Datenbanken
    • Digitale Audiotechnik
    • Digitale Videotechnik
    • Projektmanagement
    • BWL
    • Wirtschaftsenglisch

    Additional qualifications (selection)
    • Software Engineering 2
    • Kreatives Projektmanagement & Usability
    • Marketing
    • Biometrie 2
    • Verteilte Systeme
    • Wirtschaftsspanisch
    • Fotografie

  6. Graduand IT & Development

    –

    amiando AG, Munich, Germany

    Read about widgets and how I discovered and implemented solutions to sell tickets for your event on your own website

    For my diploma thesis I was tasked to find a possibility to add amiando’s at this time relatively new event ticket shop feature to other websites as easy as possible. This was later on a unique selling point and used widely which helped to expand amiando’s reach and brand awareness, led to more customers (event hosts and ticket buyers), and boosted its SEO score.

    Thesis: Widgets — Untersuchung und Implementierung der verschiedenen Integrationsmöglichkeiten von Internetanwendungen

    • researched and compared ways to include parts and functionality of an event webpage in other websites
    • built semantic and responsive ticketshop widget to work in iframes and popup windows, fully customizable in width, height, colors and used language
    • implemented cross-domain communication to automatically resize the iframe to its full content height to not display any scrollbars for a seamless integration into the host’s website
    • resizing of iframe is based on polling dynamically generated iframes within the ticketshop widget iframe which represent the height of its content in binary
    • in contrast to other popular cross-domain communication variants the website owner only needs to load one javascript file from amiando’s server, thus making it as easy and fail-proof as possible to implement by providing a small code snippet
    • additionally to this per-event-add-on the team and I explored and developed a white label plug-in solution to add event administration and the ticketshop widget to Joomla-based websites
    • although the ready-made plug-in was never widely used by other websites this implementation was a showcase for the ticketshop API, which got deployed by e.g. BMW, mixxt, Nachtagenten, Clubstars and usgang.ch and furthermore led to the implementation as an Google OpenSocial app
    • adding this feature has helped expanding amiando’s reach significantly and started many cooperations with event agencies

  7. Project Manager Usability Lab

    –

    American Express, Frankfurt, Germany

    Read about my responsibilities on this university project

    In my sixth semester at FH Gießen-Friedberg I participated in the compulsory course ‘Kreatives Projektmanagement & Usability’ in which we worked on a joint project with American Express Germany. Our course group was tasked to undertake a usability lab to get their ‘Corporate Cards’ landing page tested to furthermore identify bottlenecks which lead to underwhelming conversion rates.

    • co-managed the project with a fellow student under the lecturer’s supervision
    • conducted and evaluated usability tests with several participants from the target group using Techsmith Morae
    • co-presented the final results after 4 months of intensive research in front of several American Express Germany managers including C-levels

  8. Intern

    –

    Gölz&Schwarz, Munich, Germany

    Read about the marketing website and computer based training projects I worked on

    As part of my academic studies I did an internship at Gölz&Schwarz and supported a colleague in the department ‘Kreation’ to work on various joint and individual projects.

    Project: MarketingSuite Website (finished in October)

    • marketing website to promote the SaaS version of the in-house developed custom CMS
    • responsible for composing, designing and implementing static website templates, which afterwards got sliced into CMS components by a different team
    • the aim was to demonstrate the ease-of-use of the product and to generate leads through an always visible contact form
    • the newly developed branding should resemble the typical Web 2.0 appearance, subtly based on the corporate identity
    • the code should be free of layout tables and consist of semantic XHTML enforcing the latest strict doctype definition and up-to-date CSS techniques
    • Adobe Photoshop Eclipse Subversion

    Project: Siemens Gigaset Home Planner (finished in September)

    • interactive Computer Based Training videos for sales staff
    • responsible for screen recording, cutting and dubbing of the e-learning videos in Techsmith Camtasia according to the existing storyboards
    • additionally responsible for designing and implementing of a stand-alone running, multilingual Macromedia Flash application based on corporate identity guidelines using ActionScript and Zinc to select and control the videos

    Project: VBM Entgelt­Rahmen­Abkommen (finished in September)

    • interactive presentation and visualization of the latest regional collective agreement on the new classification and remuneration system for the members of the ‘Verband der Bayerischen Metall- und Elektro-Industrie (VBM)’, consisting of around 420'000 employees in over 600 companies
    • responsible for final drawing of various graphics and charts in Adobe Illustrator
    • composing and color grading of key visuals Adobe Photoshop
    • placing and arranging of the content in Macromedia Director according to the storyboard
    • Technical contact person for the customer

  9. Diplom-Biologe (dropped out)

    –

    University of Karlsruhe, Germany

    I dropped out, but learned for life

    Having participated in Biology A-levels during school I thought studying Biology would fit perfectly. Which turned out it didn’t because setting up, customizing and maintaining a phpBB bulletin board to connect biology and chemistry students all around Germany was way more interesting.

  10. Intern as Digital Media Designer

    –

    OK Werbung, Friedrichsdorf, Germany

    Read about how I got to know agency work

    I was co-responsible for the day-to-day routine, being in direct contact with many clients and processing their orders coming through Leonardo. I learned working with Macromedia Freehand and deepened my skills in Adobe Photoshop and Quark Xpress, helping preparing documents for pre-print and Computer-To-Film, which I then manually exposed to cromaline proofs.

  11. Compulsory community service

    –

    Pflegeheim ‘Haus Anneli’, Usingen, Germany

    Helping the community

    Among other things responsible for computing hardware, local network and front desk.

  12. A levels

    –

    Christian-Wirth-Schule, Usingen, Germany

    Read about my first voluntary website project, my courses and school exchanges

    In my last 3 years of school a friend and me worked on our school’s website as volunteers. Back then being represented on this new online thing was not a priority for the school, so we took over a domain, gathered content for the page, redesigned and relaunched it mostly on our own. The reception changed dramatically after we presented the somewhat completed project to the school’s council. Afterwards we even were allowed to run an HTML and CSS workshop for other pupils during a project week.

    Specialized Course

    • Biology
    • English

    School exchange

    • Noblesville High School, Noblesville, Indiana, USA (March 1999)
    • Rush Henrietta High School, Rochester, New York, USA (March 1998)

  13. HTML Editor

    –

    Trius AG, Friedrichsdorf, Germany

    Dotcom bubble, anyone?!

    Getting paid to edit and test HTML templates for a custom intranet tool for employee absenteeism management.

Experience through personal projects

I like to tackle sideprojects to get out of my comfort zone, to dip into other directions, to experiment with new techniques and ideas and to generally learn by doing new things.

Other interests

Swiss army knife by day, tinkerer by night. While most of my hobbies revolve around the digital space and mastering web development in all its facets (did I already mention I am always eager to learn new stuff?!) I enjoy going into the mountains, especially during winter riding downhill (and from the coming season maybe even hiking uphill) on various types of boards (currently 6 pairs of ski and 2 snowboards), and playing Basketball.

And when the rest of the family is already asleep I sometimes wrangle with my RaspberryPis (currently 7) and make desperate efforts to keep my smart home and home network running. No, I will not fix your computer but might help you deploy Nextcloud, Pi-Hole and a decent NAS backup strategy to own your data.

mail twitter mastodon linkedin xing