Keeps SAP running. Mostly.
I've been in IT since the days of the 286 — professionally since 2000, and in SAP since 2006. Long enough to have seen most corners of the stack, and to know there are always more corners.
These days I look after the SAP platform at Würth IT, with teams spread around the globe. Most of my time currently goes into people rather than systems — getting a team ready for a future in the cloud, and planning the move of rather a lot of on-premise systems into SAP RISE. The systems, it turns out, are the easy part.
Somewhere along the way, leading people became the main job: teams across time zones, very different backgrounds, the occasional reorganisation. I treat it like Basis work — keep things running, remove blockers, don't panic. Turns out that works on humans too.
Before that: two decades of planning, building, and running SAP landscapes for companies that rely on them. Mostly, they ran. And before all of it: a 286 in a teenager's room (“for homework”), ISDN channel bonding, the school network, a private IRC network and a bit of webhosting. Uptime mattered even then. Linux came early too — Fedora community, translations, ambassador work. Giving back, quietly.
New topics tend to stick quickly — AI, BTP, people, whatever comes next. Curiosity does most of the work. I post on LinkedIn when it is necessary; most things happen quietly in the background.
Looking after the SAP platform, with teams around the globe. Back where it all started as an apprentice, 25 years later.
Planning, building, running. Repeat.
SAP Basis at fashion-industry pace. Learned to move fast without breaking prod.
Consulting. Discovered the stack has more corners than expected.
Started as an apprentice in 2000, went full-time in 2003. Towards the end: first SAP system. It never really let go.
The SAP stack is large. After twenty years, most of it looks familiar.
I serve on the board of the local music and fanfare corps — the only place where I hold root.
Two child processes at home. They use most of the memory, and they cannot be killed. There is also a wife — the one process that deserves far more scheduler time than she gets.
I poke at AI tools to see what they can do — at work and off duty. Once taught an AI class at a primary school. Toughest audience so far; steering committees ask easier questions.