About me
I have been writing software for about forty years, the last fifteen or so almost entirely on Apple platforms, which means I have watched at least three “this changes everything” moments arrive and leave again, and learned to be patient with the fourth. Most of that work happened where mistakes are expensive — banks, insurers, payment systems, a stretch of medical devices — places that teach you quickly that the interesting part of an app is rarely the part the user sees.
These days I work for myself out of Switzerland, building iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps in SwiftUI and working out where generative AI actually earns its keep in the way software gets made, which is a narrower set of places than the current noise suggests, and I am happy to say so. I also run AI assessments for smaller firms that want a plain answer about what is worth doing and what is mostly marketing, and I teach SwiftUI and Apple-platform architecture at the FHNW — partly because explaining something to a room of students is the fastest way to find out whether you actually understand it.
The projects here are the practical side of that. PUCO is a prompt launcher I use every day and ship on the App Store. The AIIA Privacy Proxy strips personal data out of a prompt before it ever reaches a cloud model, on the theory that sending your customers’ details to a third party and hoping for the best is not a security strategy. WHALE.WATCH follows large trades across a Solana exchange in real time; it began as a curiosity and stayed because the problem was harder than it looked.
Before the freelance years there were others — lead mobile architect at Zühlke, senior iOS work at PostFinance, a long run building international apps at Cephei, and a modular platform for Allianz that ended up running in several countries. Earlier still I wrote roughly ten technical books, back when people printed those. The thread through all of it is the same: take a tangled, half-explained problem and turn it into something that still holds up after launch, once the cleverness has worn off and only the structure is left.
I work in German, English and French. I am German, I live in Switzerland, and I have made my peace with both.