View About Timo Rößner on GitHub

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Hey There

I have been a software developer for more than a decade (and still am proud open source maintainer of the awesome Reek gem gem) before I became a leader. I have spent almost all of my professional life in international startups with a strong focus on product and execution.

I excel at building the right teams with the right culture and then scale them up as the business grows.

If you’re just interested in my leadership philosophy and principles check out this presentation.

My inspirations

There are many inspirations and inspirational people in my life:

My favourite inspirational quote is from Aaron Swartz:

Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.

My interests

Playing videogames with my daughter is certainly one of my favorite pastimes. When I’m not doing that I’m flying an aircraft or at least trying to - I’m currently in the process of getting my pilot licence. I’m hoping to buy a beautiful Cirrus SR22 or an Extra 300 so I can visit each country on this planet by flying there with my own aircraft. Yeah, I said that unironically ;)

Other than that I have been training Brazilian jiu-jitsu for quite a few years now and still do so even though I really suck at it. I also play guitar whenever I feel like it. And finally I love math and physics (all sciences really, but you gotta make some concessions since you can’t do it all) and am studying math on the side being enrolled in a remote university.

Voluntary work

  • One of my most recent activities was giving introductory programming lessons to female immigrants in refugee camps for the ReDi school in Berlin.
  • I still regularly mentor and coach the kids I taught in the programming classes above.
  • I used to volunteer as a German teacher for refugees at the Offene Tuer.
  • I help out occasionally at the Berliner Obdachlosenhilfe handing out food to homeless people.

Education

  • I have a Bachelor of Science in Bioinformatics from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2005.
  • I am currently studying mathematics on the side with the final goal of getting a PHD.

What I am doing professionally

What I am doing professionally can best be summarised with Team building &Blitzscaling:

Blitzscaling is what you do when you need to grow really, really quickly. It’s the science and art of rapidly building out a company to serve a large and usually global market, with the goal of becoming the first mover at scale.

This happens mostly in a software engineering context but is naturally not limited to it - I am used to collaborate closely and contribute to HR, recruiting, marketing and sales.

Recurring activities for me are:

  • Leadership coaching
  • Goal setting both on a team level and on a department-wide scale
  • Strategic initiatives, e.g. career development, career ladder, technical and managerial initiatives across the engineering department
  • Team building
  • Boosting team productivity and happiness

What I bring to the table

  • A love for people management and seeing them realize their full potential.

  • Building up teams by recruiting the best people. I’d go as far as to say that team play is 10 times more important than “being an expert” since it’s far easier to become good at something than transitioning from being a douche to somebody who can carry and motivate a team. You can read up on my recruiting philosophy here.

  • Motivation and the passion to motivate others: I believe that vision and purpose on the high level, clear responsibilities and maximum autonomy are the keys to high productivity and happiness.

  • The passion to create something that might change change the world. I don’t care much for money - my motivation lies elsewhere. This doesn’t mean that I work for free, just that I value other things more.

  • Excellence in software engineering. I’m obsessed with code quality and writing elegant, maintainable code. I am a regular open source contributor and maintainer of a couple of more or less popular gems. Most notably of the awesome Reek gem - check out my github profile for more. Additionally you can find quite a few mostly technical articles on my blog.

Technologies I have worked with

I have been fully focused on management for the last couple of years or so but back in the day I was a software developer working with a variety of technologies:

  • Languages: There’s hardly a language I can’t find anything positive about it. I have worked with a lot of dynamic languages like Ruby, PHP, Python, javascript and static languages like Java. I also like esoteric languages like brainfuck or whitespace for the fun of it.
  • Databases: Over the course of the years I have worked with good old SQL databases (PostgreSQL, mySQL), NoSQL databases (Redis and friends) and Big Data databases (Hbase / Hadoop).
  • I spent the majority of my career focusing on backend development (mostly API / SOA environments) but have spent enough time in frontend and mobile development to know my way around.
  • Other than that I like and have worked with Amazon cloud, google cloud, git, git branches (yes!), test driven / behaviour driven development and domain driven design.

Professional experience

Dec 2021 - Present / CTO

MedKitDoc

We strive for a world where all people have access to patient-centred, high-quality and digital healthcare regardless of their location. By combining our MedKitDoc App, trained specialists and our MedKit with certified medical devices, we are creating a completely new way of remote treatment.

Oct 2018 – March 2021 / Senior Director of Engineering

Toptal

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. Top companies rely on Toptal freelancers for their most important projects. I was responsible for all product related development teams (around 150 developers, 25 teams) and making sure that we build the right things at the right time.

Jan 2018 – Sept 2018 / Engineering Manager

ResearchGate, Berlin (Germany)

ResearchGate is changing how scientists share and advance science. It is built by scientists, for scientists. Our mission is to connect the world of science and make research open to all.

Oct 2016 – Dec 2017 / Director of Software Engineering

Planet, Berlin (Germany)

Planet builds, ships and operates the biggest satellite fleet in the history of mankind. As director of software engineering I was responsible for building and scaling the software engineering team, develop new and innovative analytical products on top of our vasts amount of data and maintaining our existing production systems. Planet has a strong philanthropic aspect to everything it does and we’re always helping communities and researchers to make use of our data in the best way possible.

March 2014 – Sept 2016 / Director of Software Engineering

Blacklane, Berlin (Germany)

Blacklane is a ride-hailing service that is working world wide with the highest aspirations in regards to quality and customer satisfaction. As director of software engineering I was responsible for scaling the team from 10 to 30 developers, change the underlying architecture to be more microservice focused and evangelize new technologies and clean code conventions.

April 2013 – Feb 2014 / Senior Software Developer

Hitfox Group, Berlin (Germany)

The Hitfox Group is a company builder and accelerator in the Berlin startup ecosystem. As senior software developer I was working on high load production services and new products.

2002 – 2013 / Freelance Software Developer

A lot of freelancing in the Berlin startup eco system mostly working with dynamic languages like Ruby, Python and Javascript.

Contact

Mail: timo.roessner [at] gmail.com

You can also find me on …

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