Bringing animations to Pitch

• Part of the team that brought some of the most-requested features to Pitch: enter and exit effects, continuity (Pitch’s version of Magic Move), and slide transitions. Until December 2023, Pitch users had created around 1 million animations.

• Wrote two well-received RFCs that helped generate unanimous buy-in for the engineering team's vision of building a general and flexible feature platform for animations.

• Led the effort to unblock development of the animation features by proposing and introducing a novel approach to portable data that quickly gained adoption across Pitch.

Modularizing the Pitch frontend

• Picked to become a part of the team responsible for coming up with a North Star architecture for the Pitch frontend systems.

• Helped bring the Moira library (now open source) to life as a vehicle to support teams within a growing org to independently develop, maintain and deploy distinct units of functionality without getting into each other’s way.

• Formulated and implemented a plan to modularize the Pitch frontend application, starting with the client-side router.

Making Pitch launch-ready

• Contributed to a number of frontend features critical for the public launch of Pitch (in Q4/2020), including video upload, video player, custom fonts, media picker (with Unsplash and Giphy integration), and inline editors.

KARO was a design/web consulting agency that I co-founded.

• At the agency, I started out as a Creative Director in web design and corporate identity projects, and gradually transitioned towards doing more engineering-centric work.

• Besides client work, I also did a number of more experimental software projects during this time, most notably Pen, a design tool that live-syncs a vector drawing canvas with an SVG code editor.

The ILLC at the University of Amsterdam is one of the world's most renowned institutes for doing research at the intersection of logic, language and computation. At the institute, I conducted research on information flow in multi-agent systems, and obtained my PhD.

Z_punkt is one of the leading German foresight strategy and innovation consultancies. I was a project lead/co-lead in consulting projects serving clients from various industries. I was also in charge of numerous research and publication projects.

Moira is an open source library for modular frontend applications written in ClojureScript that I contributed to. It grew out of a project devoted to defining a North Star frontend architecture for Pitch.

Together with the designer Kevin Cannon, we analyzed frequent user flows in Pitch and optimized them for speed of editing. A particular focus were improvements to image-related tasks like image replacement, image cropping, panning and zooming. As part of this project, I shipped the first AI feature in Pitch: smart image cropping.

Pen is a vector design tool that live-syncs a drawing canvas with an SVG markup editor. I built it from scratch with minimal dependencies, out of an interest in hybrid interfaces that combine design tools with a code editor, and out of a desire to understand the architecture of modern frontend editing tools in depth.

Read the case study on my website, or try out the demo version.

48k is a studio of composers and songwriters that make music for advertising campaigns. At KARO, we developed a brand identity and website for them that communicates their deep expertise in composition, and the unique contribution made by their musical scores.

This project won an award from the Art Director's Club for Germany.

Enrolled to elevate my visual design skills, did not seek a degree. I worked intensively with photography during this period.

Graduated 2001 (cum laude)