Most of the work is asking the right questions.
Software tools for the teams that ship games and desktop applications – and, for engineering groups that need it, an experienced outside view.
Approach
Turning the crank
Asking questions. Then more of them.
Who is the customer? What is the product? What problem does the product solve for the customer? The questions are obvious ones, mostly.
Unglamorous work, and the part most engagements skip in favour of arriving with an answer. But by the time the questions run out, the team usually knows what to do. The recommendation writes itself. The work was making the room think clearly enough to see it.
Consulting
CTO as a Service
Building the right thing. Building it right.
Plenty of teams ship steadily for years without anyone asking whether the direction still makes sense. Not because nobody could – because nobody in the room is independent enough to. That gap is what this is for.
- Fractional CTO on a monthly retainer. A fixed amount of senior attention every month: is the architecture carrying the product or holding it back, is the roadmap real, is the team pointed at what matters?
- Modernisation. Teams standing on decades-old foundations – Fortran, DB2, and their descendants – need a way off them that doesn't stop the business for two years.
- Mentoring for engineering leads growing into the job – the part that outlasts the engagement.
Behind it: decades of shipping software. Developer tools, virtual and augmented reality platforms, creative applications, large-scale backends. Software companies in Germany and the United States, on products used by millions of people. Teams of up to fifty.
A degree in computer science from the University of Würzburg, 1995, specialising in artificial intelligence – which at the time meant Lisp and expert systems, not GPUs.
Availability is limited. A few engagements at a time.
Product
Nightship
Shipping builds. Not chasing them.
Game studios and everyone involved in building software: testers, QA, designers, artists, producers, the people who sign it off. Nightship is a build distribution platform – what comes out of the CI pipeline lands on their machines, with a Run button. It removes the step where everyone waiting on last night's build is waiting on someone else to send it.
In beta – shipping soon
Contact
Get in touch
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