After almost five years, I quit 9elements at the end of October 2012. This wasn’t easy for me as I have been the company’s second full-time employee, knowing them from the beginning, and accompanied Sebastian, Eray and the rest of the team through good times and bad. Seeing an agency grow from a bunch of friends hacking in a tiny apartment to a company with more than a dozen employees within a short timeframe through creativity and craftsmanship was thrilling and I’m proud to have been a part of this. During this time, 9elements was never just an employer, they were dear friends and I’m glad they still are, even though I’m not working with them anymore.

Developing software there was my first actual full-time job after leaving university. I’ve never worked for anyone else (not counting several short internships during my school and university time) so after five years I felt the need to go out and make new experiences. Despite always wanting to, I never managed to leave the Ruhr area and go to Berlin. At every occasion, there was always something or other that held me here. After school, I decided to go to TU Dortmund to study with a classmate. During my studies, I was too busy to make the move and towards the end of my diploma, it was clear that I would join 9elements.

But now, in September, an opportunity presented itself to join Sascha, Paolo and Stephan at Thriventures, a startup working on a promising cloud based content-delivery solution, and move to Berlin. This was a tough move, pretty uncommon for me, as I’ve always been someone who likes safety and comfort, but now that the decision is made I’m excited and looking forward to use my knowledge and experience to develop a great product in a great team.

At Thriventures I do primarily frontend development. In the future I probably won’t be writing and talking about Rails anymore, but instead try to spread my love for AngularJS and my frustrations with Javascript ;)

For now, I’m working from home most of the time, waiting for my girlfriend to finish her bachelor thesis. In April we will finally move to Berlin.

Looking forward to meeting you there.