About me and my skills

Quick links:
The past
The present
What you can expect from me
What I expect from you
Drupal
Tooling and other stuff

The past

I started assembling my own PCs from about 1995 to extract every possible Mhz for low budget (yeah, overclocked dual-socket Intel Celeron 400 ftw).

About 1998, during school, pocket money was just not enough so I started building my first website for a near company using HTML 4 and Dreamweaver - yes, already back then table layouts where old and replaced by CSS layouts.

After that, playing computer games and life and university became more interesting and it took until 2005 when I started doing websites again. I started two companies, one with my mother and my freelancing business (the latter till this day). During my 3 years at University of Klagenfurt I learned to "code" (beyond HTML and CSS) with some small Java projects.

From there I did mostly PHP projects with Mambo/Joomla and Serendipity but also some e-commerce sites with xt-commerce, Oxid e-sales and some other projects with different libraries and CMSes. Around mid 2013 I started to work together with Zensations on Drupal projects up till today.

The present

Currently I'm doing mostly Drupal architecture and backend development and leading/collaborating with fellow developers on tailored solutions like e-commerce, international NGO platforms with lots of API integrations from multiple different vendors (payment providers) and internal systems (CRM, ERPs, accounting) via REST, SOAP, XML, GraphQL or even CSV files.

Past experience shows that different use cases need different solutions. In the case of Drupal for example there are more lightweight solutions for running a small site or a blog - when the flexibility of Drupal is not needed. But if you want full control over data structure and/or fully decoupled CMS, custom checkout flow, etc. - then Drupal might be the right choice. As said, it depends - so let's find out!?

What you can expect from me

• organised and reliable approach to work
• planning and estimations with room for unexpected roadblocks to avoid overshooting budget, stress
• raising awareness of non obvious roadblocks, hidden costs, missing information, ...
• going the extra mile and double check that things work/not break
• self-learning on your projects, libraries, tooling, ... (good briefings/introductions still crucial to avoid spending time on basics)
• transparency in pricing, work, availability
• letting you know when I'm not the right choice for the job

What I expect from you

• proper planning on time-frames to avoid stress for everybody involved
• good briefings and documentation (otherwise time for exploration needed)
• transparency on budget, expectations, known issues, available information, communication
• time efficiency in communications (reduce hour long calls and meetings to a minimum)
• punctual payment of bills

Drupal

I have started working intensively on Drupal projects since 2013. We were working primarily on bigger projects with lots tons custom code written. Integrations from external APIs to ERPs, CRMs, Single-Sign-On (SSO), newsletter systems or other internal custom systems and data pools. Big projects with Drupal Commerce and highly performing Drupal apps used for big votings handling well over 1M votes and users.

Drupal 7 specific modules/tools using a lot

tooling Features, Drush (Drush make for continous deployments), Redis, Drupal custom installation profiles approach, DDEV, platform.sh CLI

functionality Views, Ctools (ctools content-types, access, context plugins), Entity API, Rules, Commerce, Migrate, Token, Pathauto

theming Panelizer, Page Manager, Panels, Panels Everywhere (Styleguide tailored markup output), Libraries API, Styleguides (Fabricator) used to separate design/CSS from theming in Drupal

Drupal 8 specific modules/tools using a lot

tooling Drush, Console, Config-Split, Config-Ignore, Redis, Memcache, Acquia BLT, DDEV, platform.sh CLI

functionality Core (Views, Entity API), Commerce, Migrate, Paragraphs, Token, Pathauto

theming Most works with new Twig layer, no more Panelizer, Paneles suites needed, yay Styleguides (PatternLab)

Tooling and other stuff

General Stack / tech used

Git, Bash, PHPStorm, Atom, NodeJS, NPM, Yarn, YouTrack, Jira, Bitbucket, Github, Slack, Mattermost

Experiences with other projects (only most used ones and by no means complete list ;))

Laravel, Lumen, TailwindCSS, Wordpress, Oxid e-Sales, Magento

Other programming languages used/worked with beside PHP ecosystem

Javascript, Elixir, Java, Python, Ruby