The Long Version

I started coding in 2000. Some anonymous guys on the internet told me to learn Visual Basic, Delphi, and C. Then PHP, microcontrollers, the usual path.

By 2011 I was a RedHat Certified Instructor, teaching JBoss in Germany, Austria, and the UAE. Then consulting - Siemens, Swiss Post, Prague Airport, a German telco.

In December 2015, at 25, I quit my job and went freelance.

My first client was ING Bank. What started as a contract turned into six years. I was tech lead for a global customer engagement platform built on Kafka - reading events, triggering push notifications across countries (Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Germany, Philippines, Poland). Later I became interim product owner for a streaming data analytics team. A year in, I founded LionMint GmbH and moved the contract there.

By 2020, I had grown the consultancy to 7 people. Good team, good clients. But I realized I preferred going deep on fewer projects rather than managing a growing operation.

So in 2022 I went solo - deep client engagements (currently energy trading), hands-on engineering, and room to build products on the side.

SoTrusty - commerce platform, co-founded with my wife Daniela. Launched in Germany and Mexico.

EmbedElite - document intelligence. Won the Microsoft Semantic Kernel Hackathon. They called it "a game-changer."

Audioscrape - podcast search engine. 1M+ hours indexed. First MCP integration for Claude. 43,000 lines of Rust, built solo in 5 months.

- Lukas