I am a self-taught web developer, entrepreneur, and mentor. Being curious is the basis of my journey so far.

While studying for a master’s degree in Central European History, small personal programming projects challenged me. I built a multilingual dictionary for three Slavic languages, German and English, or automated my account in an MMOG to push me into the top 10.

After my studies, I used an entrepreneurial scholarship to build a semi-automatic translation tool to help occasional translators to find the right word. It failed economically but paved my road to becoming an entrepreneur.

For a while, I built online shops and platforms for clients, often benefitting from the knowledge about marketing and SEO which I picked up from my site projects. Many of these projects are still crushing it today.

In 2009, I drew lousy letters in Scrabble, which led me to develop a Scrabble word search for German, the first one around. A few years later, this turned into a publishing business. Before selling the project nine years later, my team and I reached millions of users and more than 40 MM page impressions per month.

Part of my platform’s financial success was a WordPress plugin I engineered to deliver display ads on our websites. It was the first to tailor ads to responsive devices or had various options to split test ad content and positions.

In 2014, I published this in-house project under the name Advanced Ads. It quickly grew into its own business, supporting a team of up to twelve. I sold it in early 2023 and stayed on board as a consultant.

Since 2012, I have been managing projects through my company webgilde. Among the active ones are my image caption plugin Image Source Control and a travel site about Slovakia (in German).

So far, my career reads like a success story, but I have had more failures than wins.