Florian Herlings.

About

Photo by kymono

Professionally,

I am a experienced tech lead, with a teaching, coaching and software engineering background. Currently, I am working as a Technology Director at demodern and co-organizing Web Meetup Cologne1.

In the last 20 years, I worked on many IT projects focussing on eCommerce and startups, lead engineering teams with passion and empathy and helped many people becoming better technologists. I worked in different leadership roles and co-founded the e-learning platform CodeScouts. I also worked as a freelance software engineer for almost a decade. During that time, I lectured at multiple universities, teaching web development.

Sometimes I share things on LinkedIn and Instagram, or even Twitter and I run a weekly newsletter for leaders in technology.

Picture of Florian holding his phone with the ocean in the background.

Personally,

I live a quiet life in the suburbs of beautiful Cologne, Germany. I love spending time with the wonderful people in my life, especially our small family. I love wasting2 time with friends at the river, having a local brew or a good single malt scotch.

I am a semi-ok long distance runner, even though my body type suggests that I spend most of my time in an arm chair, reading books about technology and magic (which is also true). I love taking walks, long conversations and that hour of the day before the sun sets.

Curriculum vitae

Technology Director at demodern
I am currently working as a tech director, helping our development teams to deliver high quality code in a hyper creative environment.
Lead Coach at SPICED Academy
I did teach full stack webdevelopment at SPICED Academy in Cologne, helping a large variety of wonderful people achieve their professional goal of becoming full stack web developers. Seeing people going from "How to make curly braces on my keyboard?" to building creative software using technology like React.js, Vue.js, Express and PostgreSQL (to name a few), is one of the most fulfilling things I have ever done.
Head of Software Development at Fashionette.de
In my role at Fashionette, I was responsible for leading the engineering team, improving the development processes and setting up the system and software architecture to ensure long term maintainability. I was also coaching the members of the development team to reach their professional goals.
VP of Engineering at InfluencerDB.com (company discontinued)
At InfluencerDB, I helped the group of engineers to truly turn into a team that was (and still is) able to achieve important company goals. I introduced new processes and methodologies into the team that helped to streamline the development process and give other teams more visibility.
I was part of forming the product vision, milestone planing as well as managing the day to day tasks. I was also responsible for the personal development of my colleagues and had a lasting impact in doing so.
CTO at KLEKT.in
I joined K'LEKT very early in its life and lead the development for over three years. As the CTO not only designed and maintained the architecture, but also made sure that we strike the perfect balance between delivering features and keeping an eye on technical debt.
Co-Founder of Codescouts.de
Co-founded the online learning platform CodeScouts.de, creating video courses about development topics in German language.
Lecturer and Trainer
Introduced students of multiple fields of study into web development and related technologies, and helped them getting working results for their projects. I tought at Hochschule Düsseldorf, EMBA and SAE Institute. I also worked directly with development teams extend their knowledge.
Software Engineer (Freelancer)
Worked for many years in different companies and projects as a freelance developer and consultant. During this time I was heavily involved in many large scale PHP projects (mostly symfony and Drupal), as well as Javascript (mostly node.js/express and react.js/webpack).
I not only implemented the needed software parts, but was also very much involved into the architecture and planing of web projects. Also helped talking to my customer's clients to understand and collect requirements

  1. As you might imagine, due to the corona pandemic still going on, the meetup is currently paused. ↩

  2. As Marthe Troly-Curtin put it: “…time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”. ↩