technologycircle

I am Henrik , a creative technologist with more than 15 years of experience in professional software development, from hands-on coding to leading a tech organization. As Head of Technology at a Hamburg-based fintech I built a team of around 50 people across three locations, so I know both sides: building things myself and enabling others to build.

Today I work as a freelancer in two directions. On one side, (AI) automation with n8n in enterprise environments, recently banking connections and SAP integrations. On the other side, hands-on software development. Sometimes as part of an existing dev team, but more often as special projects directly with the C-level: when things need to move fast, nobody knows yet what exactly is needed, or a technical topic is stuck, whether after restructurings, for new products or in the middle of a migration. I do not just advise there, I build. That is where I roll up my sleeves, write the code myself and iterate quickly.

Technically I have been working cloud-native on AWS for more than 10 years, with Node.js and TypeScript as my core stack. I cover the full range: from frontend and UI work, through serverless and containerized backends with Docker, to infrastructure, operations and SRE topics like monitoring, deployments and keeping systems reliable in production. I am comfortable owning a system end to end rather than just one layer of it.

On the side I run CustomJS, a tool with several thousand users in the n8n and Make ecosystem, which I build and operate on AWS myself.



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What am I currently doing

Tech Stack Coming from monolithic PHP development, I have been working almost exclusively serverless and cloud-native in the AWS world for 7 years now. This means that I mostly run TypeScript on AWS Lambda functions, which in combination with DynamoDB, SQS, EventBridge, S3, Cloudfront are deployed in a service architecture using Cloudfromation.

In the frontend I use a lot of tailwind/bootstrap together with Vue 3.

But I have also collected a lot of experience in C programming, Datastream oriented DirectX programming, different CMS & shop systems, Angular.js, React.js, Laravel and dockerized applications using AWS ECS over the last 25 years.


Tech Management At Exporo, I was the number one freelance developer and then built up a tech team of 50 people in 3 European locations. In the same time the whole organization grew from 5 to 250 employees. I was also involved in mergers based on M/A processes.

So I know the different phases of organizations and their impact on team topologies and the separation of monoliths to align them with growing team structures. But at the moment I want to have
very few meetings and lots of time to code.


Product wise Through my art school studies, my passion for designing new ideas has grown. This paired with my love for coding shapes my design thinking skills, which now allows me to work in an interdisciplinary way.

It is obvious that the early phase of product development is very close to my heart and that I can lead it with my additional interest in technical business and marketing.

I now try to force myself to test ideas as quickly and easily as possible before coding them. It sounds too simple but I myself have invested thousands of hours of programming in failed ideas and have seen companies lose millions because of wrong assumptions in thoughtland instead of early testing.

Make sure that you are building The Right It
before you build It right.

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