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About Me
My name is Nico, I live in germany and love tech stuff, music and photography. Luckily, I can leverage my affinity for hardware and software in my job as IT consultant. On the arty side of live I played electric guitar in a band many years ago. Hopefully, there will be another chance to do so in future :)
Product Owner
Most of my work experience in product management and as a product owner is gathered accompanying hardware and software projects. For hardware projects I worked on initial planning, competitor analysis and internal supervision of the development process. For software projects I work together with developers creating and planning new features using agile methods like SCRUM.
Coder
You can find almost all my projects on my github account @smashnet. Most prominently the software Peergroup that is using ideas from the BitTorrent protocol to sync files between XMPP users. And Simple Web Gallery that is a tiny, straight-forward web gallery based on microservices.
Digital Native
I love networks and I love sharing my knowledge and experience with others. Hence, I support the Freifunk community by spreading the word and expanding their free wifi mesh network. I'm also a time-to-time mentor at Coderdojo Cologne, an initiative to teach kids from 7 to 17 how to code by assisting them realizing their creative ideas.

Community

Community What it's about Link
Freifunk Rheinland e.V. Member since 2015 At Freifunk we build free and open networks operated by voluntary citizens. A lot of consumer WiFi routers can be run with the Freifunk firmware enabling them to build up a WiFi mesh network. This way we create a free infrastructure independent from commercial network providers. Internet access can be provided if voluntary Freifunk participants share their internet connection.
Coderdojo Cologne Voluntary coach on best effort, since 2013 Since 2013 I attend the CoderDojo in cologne as a voluntary mentor helping kids to discover their fascination for programming and helping them realizing projects they thought up themselves.

Experience

Time Title Company What I did Link
11/2018 - today Senior Consultant innoQ Deutschland GmbH I joined INNOQ in order to extend my horizon and get a deeper dive into software development and architecture. However, my main focus remains at the product owner role.
Find my INNOQ articles and blog posts here.
09/2016 - 10/2018 Product Owner - Cloud Solutions LANCOM Systems GmbH In 2016 I continued as a product owner for the LANCOM Management Cloud.
11/2014 - 08/2016 Technical Product Manager LANCOM Systems GmbH I started with product management for WiFi hardware at LANCOM Systems lasting two years. Products I supervised are:
LANCOM OAP-8xx series
LANCOM IAP-8xx series
LANCOM Antenna Portfolio

Publications

Type Title Released Link
Paper CoinParty - Secure Multiparty Mixing of Bitcoins 2015
Masters Thesis Crowd-Sourced Privacy-Preserving Creation of Elevation Profiles using Barometers 2014
Bachelors Thesis A P2P Shared Storage System based on XMPP 2012
Paper Werkzeuge zur Leistungsbewertung von dynamischen Anwendungen in Wireless Mesh-Netzwerken 2012

Education

M.Sc. RWTH Computer Science
At COMSYS I participated in several projects as a student worker and successfully finished my bachelor thesis and finally my master thesis. Find my thesis in section "Publications".
Finished in 2014
B.Sc. RWTH Computer Science
At COMSYS I participated in several projects as a student worker and successfully finished my bachelor thesis. Find my thesis in section "Publications".
Finished in 2012
Abitur
I earned the "allgemeine Hochschulreife" at Gutenberg-Gymnasium Bergheim in 2007.
Finished in 2007