Handcrafted. Quality over quantity.

I began working at Hofmann Language Services, a private language school, as a freelance web developer in January 2012. My first project was the school's international website. The previous site had been untouched for nearly a decade, so I was given complete freedom to design and build the new one from scratch. I approached it with a clear goal in mind — drive more enquiries by getting the fundamentals right: SEO, responsiveness, and accessibility.

The results spoke for themselves. Within the first month of going live, the school saw an 80% increase in conversions. It was one of my earliest projects, and looking back I can see how much I've grown as a developer since then — but the impact it had gave me the confidence to commit fully to this career path, and I've never looked back.

With the international site wrapped up, I moved on to the Japanese website. This one came with a unique challenge: the design had been created for printed flyers, and I had to find a way to translate it into something that worked on screen without losing its character. On top of that, I had to get up to speed with Japanese web design conventions and how Japanese text flows on a page — things that differ quite significantly from Western web design.

The effort paid off. Feedback from Japanese students was overwhelmingly positive — they appreciated that the site felt like it had been made with them in mind rather than simply adapted from the international version. Conversions from Japanese students saw a significant jump, validating the decision to give this audience their own tailored experience.

In 2026, Hofmann Language Services celebrated its 50th anniversary, and we decided it was the perfect opportunity to rebuild the Japanese website from the ground up with a fresher, more modern feel that also honored the milestone.

As with the original Japanese site, I was initially expected to adapt a flyer-based design for the web. After working through several iterations, I made the case to the school owner for letting me create an original design instead — and thankfully, he agreed. That decision made all the difference. Free from the constraints of an existing design, I was able to build something truly polished, responsive, and modern. It is, without a doubt, the work I am most proud of — a project that for me represents how much I have grown as a developer since that first website I built for the school back in 2012.

In January 2019, I joined Jobvalley, a service provider for young professionals, as a mobile engineer. I played a leading role in building the Jobvalley mobile app from the ground up, working alongside two other mobile engineers. Since its launch in January 2020, hundreds of thousands of Germans have used it to find work, and in 2022 the company recorded a turnover of €113.4 million alongside 20% revenue growth — numbers that reflect just how much traction the platform gained in a relatively short period of time.

This was my first experience working as an employee in tech rather than as a freelancer, and it turned out to be one of the most rewarding chapters of my career. There is something special about building something significant alongside a talented team, and the people I worked with at Jobvalley made it genuinely enjoyable. In October 2024 I handed in my resignation, and in January 2025 I moved to the Philippines with my family.

I began working at Bestlearn, an educational tech company and a subsidiary of Perapera, as a web developer and mobile engineer in June 2016. The first project I worked on was the website which would showcase several apps I built including Mirrorim, Tense Master, and Memo.

The website differentiates itself from other websites I've built in that it has a much more playful aesthetic including many SVGs and animations. It also hosted webapp versions of some of the mobile apps as well as a variety of custom-built internal software systems used by both Bestlearn and Perapera such as a content management system, a room booking system, and a Kanban board.

The first app I developed for Bestlearn was Mirrorrim. It features a minimal design where players see dots appear on the top screen in a specific order and then need to mimic the order of the dots by tapping on the corresponding spot on the bottom screen. The game helps to train one's short-term memory and concentration.

The game was downloaded over 10,000 times and received excellent reviews from students and gamers alike reaching a high of 4.6 stars on the Play Store. Google even featured the app as "Teacher Approved".

The next app I developed for Bestlearn was Tense Master. This was an educational app for learners of English as a foreign language to improve their understanding of the English tenses. The app features over 100 lessons and an unlimited number of exercises utilizing natural language generation techniques. It covers not only the base tenses but many other grammatical aspects such as mood and voice giving the user the freedom to customize each set of exercises.

Like Mirrorrim, Tense Master also received over 10,000 downloads and excellent reviews reaching a high of 4.7 stars on the Play Store.

The last and largest app I built for Bestlearn was Memo. This was an educational vocabulary-training game that featured over 100 categories for users to choose from. Each category consisted of 8 words to learn and several foreign languages including English, German, French, and Spanish. Additionally, the app featured professional voice acting for each word, a login system, high scores, and multiplayer.

After accepting the job offer from Jobvalley in October 2018, I left Bestlearn in January 2019. The mobile apps continued to receive praise for several years before being discontinued and removed from the stores. They can, however, still be found in the Wayback Machine.

I began working at Perapera, a private language learning school and the parent company of Bestlearn, as a web developer in June 2016. The school owner was having SEO-related issues with his old website and asked me to look into it. After awhile, we decided to redesign and rebuild the website from scratch with an SEO-first approach. After just one week, we saw a massive increase in conversions.

Shortly thereafter, I was asked to build the website for Bestlearn along with the mobile apps. The collaboration with Perapera and Bestlearn lasted for almost 3 years until I accepted the job offer from Jobvalley in October 2018 and left both companies in January 2019.