Work

As a Senior Frontend Engineer on the Design System Team, I created, maintained, and documented the components of the XING Design System. I supported teams implementing our components across the platform.

I was asked to create three new illustrations that could be used for an Onboarding screen on XING. I accepted the challenge to take over this task and finished the whole process from concept to scribbles, to final illustrations in a day.

My Ninjutsu Book 木隠 went online in 1999 and is my oldest and most visited website. The 10th iteration is a complete rebuild with Astro, rewritten texts, new paintings, and its own design system.

The book is now available in twelve languages, from German, English, and Japanese to Hebrew written right to left. It has full-text search and a glossary, and you can install it as an app to read offline.

More than thirty years of collecting, now as a book. All of my Ninjutsu Book in more than 500 pages on the history, philosophy, and techniques of the ninja, with around 360 images and a glossary of about 760 terms.

I designed and typeset it myself. It is free as an ebook and an accessible PDF, in German and English.

A shopping app that learns from my own trips instead of asking me to maintain a list. Konbini sorts each list in the order I walk a store, suggests what is running out with the amount I usually take, and works with one thumb, even offline.

I designed and built it with SvelteKit and SQLite. It is installable as an app, syncs live within a household, speaks English, German, and Japanese, and has an API and an MCP server for AI agents.

A one-page site for Konbini, told as kamishibai, the Japanese paper theatre. The tanuki station master tells one trip to the konbini in six picture cards, from the afternoon to the last train, and each card shows one of the app's features.

Hoshikage draws my Obsidian vaults as a night sky. An indexer reads a vault without ever writing to it, finds clusters and similar notes, and the browser draws around 8,000 notes and 140,000 connections in WebGL.

I can fly through four layouts (cloud, globe, ring, and layers), search, and read any note in place. It runs locally, without AI.

In 2024, I developed a browser extension during a Hackweek that enabled product managers, designers, and developers to identify XING Design System components on the platform, helping them find custom-developed components and UI. In 2026 I rewrote the extension from scratch and made it publicly available.

My photography site for one of my hobbies: I explore Hamburg district by district, mostly on foot, and photograph what I find. So far 20 districts, 280 kilometers, and more than 800 photos.

In 2026 I moved it to Astro and gave it a new design, Kiez Neon, which lights up in neon at night.

In 2007 I stumbled upon a Japanese book about the traditional colors of Japan by Nobyoshi Hamada. He listed all 250 colors with their color value in the appendix. I took some time to create an ASE file to be used with all common design software.

The writing template Nanzan (南山) for iA Writer is inspired by the typographic style of Engaging Japanese Philosophy by Thomas P. Kasulis. It was designed by the Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture.

The writing template Shibui (渋い) draws from the Japanese aesthetic of shibui, characterized by the quiet, unforced beauty of the Muromachi period. This visual language also influences the design of this website, a martial arts book, and a photoblog.

I created the bamboo illustration in 2006 for my Martial Arts website using Adobe Illustrator and the gradient grid tool. 2015 I decided to use my bamboo as SVG on my website. Unfortunately, the gradient tool is not supported in SVG and I needed to recreate my bamboo with linear, radial, and other supported gradients in Affinity.

I created this illustration for a previous version of my website in 2007 with a pencil on paper and then brought it into Adobe Photoshop, where all coloring was done.

I created this website for the Osteopathie-Institut Hamburg in 2010 as one of my last websites before I started working as a Frontend Engineer for XING.

I created this small website for three Thai restaurants in Hamburg in 2010. It was online for nearly ten years and I had a lot of fun creating it.