Interview with Fabian Keller, Software Engineer

For our first interview in 2018, I met my Stuttgart-office workmate Fabian Keller. He was one of the lead-Engineers for the website relaunch and the new blog, which were both relaunched recently. A lot of reasons to finally introduce him to you!

Antje: Hello Fabian, welcome to the interview. Could you please introduce yourself a little bit and how mimacom caught your attention?

Fabian: Hi Antje. I am Fabian, a Software Engineer and I´ve been working for mimacom for over 2 years now. I started as a working student after I met mimacom at an event at the university in Stuttgart. To figure out which company fits to me, I checked out all websites of the companies at the event and the mimacom website was very „shitty” at the time. I thought that I need to change that. But besides the bad website, the company sounded great. That´s why I ended up here, and now I´ve been working at mimacom for over one year in full time.

Antje: As you already said, the website was shitty, it was high time to change that! Launching a new website (including the new blog) was a project with enormous impact on the whole company. Both are already relaunched successfully. You were one of the team members, more the lead-engineer of the website team. Could you please tell your colleagues some technical insider know-how, they don´t know yet and specifications about the blog and the website.

Fabian: When we started out we wanted to build a static website that is easy to maintain. For the website we found a nice content management system that exposes the content through a REST API. We tried to transform that data into the structure a file-based static site generator required (we tried Hugo) but figured, that we could instead generate HTML directly. So we set out to build a custom static site generator with TypeScript that we now also reuse for the blog. We plan to open-source the static site generator in the course of this year. I´ve recently written a blog post about migrating a website using AWS Lambdas, that was part of the website project.

Antje: What are your current projects in the company?

Fabian: Mainly there are projects with Cloud Foundry. Most of the time I work for Migros and Datev. We are operating Cloud Foundry for their development and production environment. Other projects I am involved in, is more software/cloud consulting and teaching teams how to become cloud-natives.

Antje: Next to mimacom, you told me about a lot of hobbies?

Fabian: Yes, I try to fill my spare time with a lot of nice things. I like woodworking and build my own furniture. It´s the perfect balance to the software development, which is also my hobby and I study playing the piano for myself. Besides all that „work“ I do a lot of hiking in the black forest and travelling. My last trip for example was to Budapest on new years eve. So, you´ll see, there is no time for boredom.

Antje: We have some final quick questions so the users can get to know you better. Ready?

Antje: Gin or Tonic?

Fabian: GIN – for sure!

Antje: Web or App?

Fabian: Web

Antje: Codework or Woodwork?

Fabian: Difficult question…when I´m doing just one thing, I always miss the other thing. So it´s both.

Antje: Daihatsu or Daimler?

Fabian: Porsche!

Antje: Steak or Salmon?

Fabian: Steak.

Antje: Lambda or Lambada?

Fabian: Lambda.

Antje: Game of Thrownes or Breaking Bad?

Fabian: I don´t watch series. I even don´t have a netflix account. I prefer doing things, like woodworking.

Antje: Google search in english or german?

Fabian: English! Everything in my life is in English. My mobile phone, all my operating systems, my notes and also my thoughts. Everything!

@all: please check out the website and the new blog and the special blog post about the website. Have fun with a fresh and technical view on it.

Thank you, Fabian, for the interesting interview!