About Me

What I Do

I'm a front-end developer at aufwind, building websites with a focus on accessibility and performance. My tools of choice are HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript—I believe in progressive enhancement and native solutions. I know my way around service workers and how to take content offline. I'm also passionate about content strategy and user-centered design.

From 2013 to 2016, I was the sole developer at Smashing Magazine, turning it into the fastest loading blog on the web—a benchmark for SpeedCurve at the time. While at land in sicht—building tourist information websites and prototyping the first version of their Toubiz platform—I wrote about accessible SVG icons for 24a11y.com.

My editor of choice is VS Code—I made the switch from Sublime Text in 2020. I use Fira Code as my coding font and the Cobalt2 colour scheme by Wes Bos.

Side Quests

Games

I love playing games—cards, tabletop, video games, or anything with a ball. I grew up playing table tennis and basketball from age six, though a knee injury in 2019 means I've had to hang up the paddle and settle for shooting hoops instead of pickup games. I'll accept a challenge to H.O.R.S.E. anytime.

My favorite game of all time is Super Metroid, which I casually speedrun trying to beat my own times. I'm active in the speedrunning community.

Outdoors

I enjoy walking and hiking. I live in Freiburg, often called the gate to the Black Forest. Fifty metres from our door is a nature reserve, and the Mundenhof isn't far either.

Of the hills surrounding Freiburg, we've been up the Lorettoberg, Rosskopf, Schlossberg, Schönberg, and the Kybfelsen. A hike up to the Schauinsland is still a challenge waiting to be tackled.

Music

My love for music started at eleven, when I first heard The Prodigy. My mother raised me on 80s pop like Michael Jackson and Madonna, and disco like Funky Town by Lipps Inc and Donna Summer. My father introduced me to Santana, Cream, and Udo Lindenberg.

Today it's a passion I share with my wife. Our tastes span classical, golden twenties, soul, funk, hip-hop, techno, jungle, drum and bass, grunge, hard rock, heavy metal, and pop. We're not into country or western, though we make exceptions for Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash.

We have zero tolerance for modern German Schlager—those "Sauflieder" where every song is about drinking and sounds exactly the same. The Schlager of the 1960s, on the other hand, was genuinely good (I think).

Get in Touch

You can reach me on Mastodon or send me an email.

Built with Eleventy

This website is built with Eleventy , a simpler static site generator created by Zach Leatherman.

Typography

This website uses the following open-source fonts:

• Lexend for body text — designed by Bonnie Shaver-Troup and Thomas Jockin. Lexend is a variable font specifically designed to improve reading proficiency.
• Lora for headings — designed by Olga Karpushina of Cyreal. Lora is a well-balanced contemporary serif with roots in calligraphy.

Both fonts are served locally — no external requests are made to load typography.

Syntax Highlighting

Code examples on this site use a11y-syntax-highlighting by Eric Bailey — an accessible syntax highlighting theme that meets WCAG contrast requirements. I only changed the background colors to match the different themes of this website.

Privacy

This website does not use any tracking, analytics, or statistics tools. No cookies are set for tracking purposes, no data is collected about your visit, and no information is shared with third parties. Your privacy is respected.

Offline Support

This website uses a service worker to cache pages you visit for offline use. If you lose your internet connection, you can still read any page you've previously visited.