Andreas John

It all started in 2007 when I began my apprenticeship as an application developer (in Germany we call it Fachinformatiker für Anwendungsentwicklung — yes, Germans love long words). From day one I wrote Java and got to know the "great" Java Swing and AWT APIs — where the same button looked different on every operating system. Fun times.

I also had to deal with EJB 2. For those who don't know: that meant writing about three XML files and two interfaces just to run one line of actual code. You needed a Home interface, a Remote interface, and a lot of coffee just to print "Hello World." It was over-engineering at its finest.

In 2010 I spent a year writing COBOL. Yes, that COBOL — the language that was already old when the dinosaurs were still around. Let's just say it made me really grateful for anything built after 1970. I moved back to my old team pretty quickly and continued working with Java EE.

On the side, I also started a small freelance business and built websites with PHP for about two years — because one language at a time was clearly not enough for me.

In 2012 I decided that there had to be more. So I went back to school — literally. I did my Abitur (the German qualification you need to go to university) through weekend classes while still working full-time. After passing in 2014, I started studying Computer Science. Because, well, I still hadn't seen enough code.

Since I finished my degree in 2018, the AWS Console has been open on my screen pretty much every day. I put Java to the side (no hard feelings) and got really into Python and TypeScript instead. These days I'm especially excited about CDK and serverless — there's something really satisfying about deploying infrastructure with a few lines of code instead of clicking through a console for hours.