“The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.”
The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering

About

My values are embracing an open-mindset and engage with high motivation and high energy. I am an IT enthusiasm with a diverse background. I started my career as an account manager and developed into a Software Engineer.

Currently, I am employed as a Software Engineer working for Microsoft.

As a Cloud and DevOps consultant, I have been constantly on a steep learning curve in order to continuously improve and achieve multidisciplinary IT expertise. Continuous learning, being a team player, a high degree of accountability, and technical excellence is what I am known for.

I like to share and contribute to the success of others by speaking at internal events, contributing to inner source projects, and engaging on Hackathons. I am mentoring and teaching underrepresented minority students and graduates as a volunteer at the ReDI School.

Since 2019 I am additionally moonlighting as a Software Engineer working on cutting-edge technologies. The objective is to provide technology solutions based on substantial scientific or engineering challenges. The goal is to create research and development intensive software that brings data-driven solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses.

Here are some perspectives of my dear colleagues about me:

You have been leading and guiding the team to ensure that the best practices around code implementation have been adopted and you have been fundamental to unblock some technical challenges during the initial phase. Beyond the leadership and technical contribution, I want to highlight the human aspect of working with you. You have been always kind, gentle and willing to collaborate.

I think your biggest asset is that all colleagues regard you as a very reliable and accountable person.

I appreciated your style of thinking before you speak as well as your software engineering background in all our conversations.

Volunteering

In 2020 I started to work as a volunteer teacher for the ReDI-school. ReDI School teaches technology to break down barriers and connect the digital leaders of tomorrow. Specifically, I taught a Python introduction course to professional newcomers.

Community Work

I enjoy collaborating, sharing, and contributing to the success of others - this is something I picked up working for Microsoft.

Public speaking is a great way to challenge and push myself. My debut as a conference speaker was in 2019. I was fortunate enough to talk about a Big Data Platform implementation a team from Microsoft and I have been working on to Microsoft colleagues at Microsofts internal conference Microsoft Ready in Seattle. Later that year, I was invited to speak at the PowerShell conference EU, at which I presented a test-driven development approach to Infrastructure as Code.

Some of the stuff I present during the community events can be found on my website at talks.

Founding of mmmint.ai

In 2020 two close friends and I founded mmmint.ai.

The name is an acronym of the founders first names. And the int-part is short for intelligence, which is a reference to the data-driven machine-learning solutions that we are developing. MINT is also the German translation of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math). The name is fitting for our purpose and not only creates the baseline color for our logo but for every decision we take.

The objective of the company is to provide technology solutions based on substantial scientific or engineering challenges. Our goal is to create research and development intensive software and to bring these data-driven solutions to small- and medium-sized businesses. We develop new products based on scientific discovery and meaningful engineering innovation.

I tremendously value the learnings of starting my own company. Starting from scratch allows me to see things from a different perspective. I learn how to manage scarce resources more efficiently, like time and money. And acting as an entrepreneur teaches me to drive product innovation and market adoption, while havening a dedicated customer-focus.

Consulting

@Microsoft, I consulted on multiple large-scale Big Data and Application Platform migration projects. We modernized workloads to use cloud-native capabilities and enabled our customers to rapidly develop, release, and scale distributed applications by using cloud-native and open-source solutions on Microsoft’s Cloud Azure.

I have designed platforms by conducting architectural design sessions and implemented the design by methodically following the Cloud Adoption Framework. Furthermore, I developed software artifacts together with software engineering teams using the Microsoft system development life cycle.

Additionally, I engaged as a public speaker about latest trends and best practices - including Cloud Native, Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, and DevOps. I facilitated workshops as a Microsoft Certified Trainer and reached hundreds of developers across the broader German area and advocated technology trends. Also, I was fortunate enough to facilitate and host the @PowerShell UserGroup in Munich starting in 2017 right after joining Microsoft.

I value a continuous-improvement mindset, which is why I engage in numerous inner source projects at Microsoft. Which is why I founded and maintained an Infrastructure as Code Framework, as well as engaged as an active maintainer and top contributor to open- and inner-source projects. For instance, did I contribute to the DevOps Dojo community, to help customers and colleagues to create multidisciplinary DevOps teams.

The created material are now offered as a public learning experience on the Microsoft docs for free.

Lastly, I lead a few internal software development teams to create software artifacts and tools. Those tools have been developed to be reused in customer deliveries or to automate internal delivery processes. The tools improved customer delivery quality, created value for customers quicker while also reducing cost by removing toil and speeding up processes.

Microsoft allowed me to dig into the latest technologies. I was able to achieve numerous certifications. My badges can be found on acclaim/mark-warneke.

Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals Microsoft Certified: Dynamics 365 Fundamentals Microsoft Certified: Microsoft 365 Fundamentals Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Engineer Associate Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert Microsoft Certified: Azure DevOps Engineer Expert MCSA: Cloud Platform MTA: Security Fundamentals Microsoft Certified Trainer

I also obtained the CNCF Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD) and HashiCorps Terraform Associate certifications.

At Microsoft I started to value continuous learning, being a team player, havening a high degree of accountability, and achieve a high degree of technical excellence. I got challenged every day and grew not only as a professional but also as a person, adopting a lot of the good practices to my personal life.

Self-employment

In 2019 I started to moonlight as a self-employed Software Engineer. My idea was to get some hands-on software development experience.

@Eve I got the opportunity to work on an accessibility product that recognizes speech to generates automated live captions. Eve augments humans. By proposing the transcript humans can review and correct the AI’s suggestions.

The idea is to enable and make conferences more accessible and inclusive by providing live captions and translation. Users can read the captions on large external monitors or even on their phones. Everything is configurable to the attendee’s needs and preferences - from language settings to text size, and visual representation.

Eve allowed me to develop further as a Software Engineer, always pushing for the most innovative and suitable solutions. We adopted many cloud-native technologies. A micro-services architecture on Kubernetes, web-sockets, feature-flags, and a full continuous deployment pipeline.

The engagement at EVE taught me how to develop a product in a small team. And how to do it truly agile. How to innovate and how to bring features to end-users as quickly as possible - while keeping the services available and resilient.

During the self-employment I engaged on Microsoft 365 Administration work for SMB companies. I managed and operated Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Exchange Online, as well as Azure Active Directories.

Futhermore I supported on and conducted Business Intelligence projects. The goal was to visualize KPI, create and design dashboards using PowerBI and SQL. I implemented and leveraged the CRISP/DM process for my customers.

The self-employment taught me what it means to operate a business, and that not only hard-skills like software-development and operations is needed to start a successful business. It also taught me that some algorithms are easier to understand then tax implications.

B.Sc. Business Informatics

During university @the University of Applied Science Münster, I fell in love with software engineering. I chose to specialize in Web & Software Engineering and I took courses in business intelligence, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

At the time I was always looking to apply my theoretical knowledge and since the second semester, I started working as a working student for different companies. Vectron Systems allowed me to apply my knowledge as a web developer and get my feet wet as a professional Software Engineer.

During my studies, I engaged as a consultant for the student consultancy KREAKTIV Münster e.V.. Which allowed me to get some exposure to work as a consultant on IT projects. The club offered a variety of seminars including a six sigma certification which I gladly took advantage of. I was exposed to multiple companies and students with different backgrounds, all of them embracing a high performance mindset.

I graduated and conducted my bachelor thesis @Porsche. At Porsche, I wrote about the IT service management process of the digital production planning systems. At this time I focused on the classic change management processes described in ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).

The agile way of working and the DevOps movement was something I have not been exposed to and thus was not aware of.

Looking back I value studying the ITIL. The background of ITIL gives me a different perspective on what companies are used to adopt, and understand established processes as well as with what mindset some professional still adopt. It allows me to have a educated conversation about modern application lifecycle management.

Working Student

During my studies, I was lastly working as a Software Engineer for Ratiodata.

@Ratiodata I was developing an application called Scan2bank21. Scan2bank21 is an Android-based multifunction device application, that leads to greater efficiency and cost savings for banks.

My job included working across the Software Development Lifecycle from requirements engineering, prototyping, automated testing, and even the training of new developers. At this time I learned about why version control matters, how to automate the build process and why versioned artifacts are crucial. I was packaging JAR files with ANT on my developer machine and released the packaged software via a tedious manual certification process.

Ricoh and Ratiodata partnered to develop sector-specific document management services for financial services institutions. This involved optimizing internal work and information processes within banks by digitizing documents and overall making the processes of document management more efficient.

The challenge has been to designing a lightweight yet efficient Java application. The program had to run on multiple specific hardware systems, including multiple form factor, display sizes and with different levels of computing power. The application needed to process and transform image data. I implement a rudimental Object Character Recognition (OCR) using the provided vendor specific as well as open-source libraries.

At Ratiodata I learned how to develop a software product and iteratively and incrementally improve until you create something magnificent. My boss always encouraged my by saying:

It is called Software Development, not Software Production

History

My career started as a Management Assistant apprentice @ETe-Datentechnik - a small company from my hometown specializing in network technology.

I became the only account manager for the company at the age of just 18. And my responsibility grew not only to be certified in the main technologies that the company offered, including Cisco, VMware and IBM, but also to drive existing and create new business.

My job included sales but also project management of customers IT Hardware like Server & Storage solution projects, as well as corporate IT networking & Voice over IP telephony.

I was responsible for generating new businesses. I conducted cold-calls, drove marketing initiatives and kept the books up to date while keeping exiting customers happy. My greatest success at that time was landing a huge server & storage project with IBM from a cold-call.

After three years of experience, I moved on to university at the age of 20.

ETe taught me a lot about becoming a professional. I am very grateful for the experience, as well as the trust that has been put into me - The experiences at ETe created a solid foundation for my future career.