About
Hi 👋 I’m Sebastian. I’m a mobile developer with 4+ years of experience across several platforms. I’ve worked on Windows with WPF, UWP on Windows 8 and then 10, Android, and since 2018 focusing heavily on iOS development using UIKit and Swift (and ♥-ing it!). Since 2015 I’ve been working at SAP, where I’ve developed not just mobile apps but also some nifty backend apps too. At SAP, my team creates fun and useful apps for our colleagues to help boost their productivity and inject a little fun into the everyday 😊
What drives me as a developer and software engineer is curiosity - over the years in school and working in the industry I’ve always made sure to learn that new framework, pick up that shiny new technology, or just try out the latest hip design pattern.
Education
- 🎓 Rowan University, Glassboro, NJ – B.S./M.S. Computer Science
Languages
Skills
- Apple Technologies: iOS, tvOS, watchOS, SwiftUI, Combine, Xcode, TestFlight, Instruments
- Apple Frameworks: UIKit, MapKit, CoreLocation, WatchKit, XCTest, UserNotifications
- Backend Technologies: JAX-RS, EclipseLink, Jersey, SAP HANA, SAP Cloud Platform
- Design Patterns: MVC, MVVM, Delegate/Closure, Protocol Oriented Programming
- Dependency Management: Maven, Gradle, CocoaPods, Carthage, Swift Package Manager
- Version Control: Git, GitHub, Subversion
- Project Management: JIRA, GitHub, Agile
- Spoken Languages: German & English (native bilingual)
Professional Experience
IT Technology Consultant | SAP
At SAP, I’m focused on creating beautiful and fast native app experiences to help our colleagues run better and improve their daily workflow. Here’s a quick look at some of the projects I have been involved in.
Corona-Warn-App
The start of 2020 saw the spread of COVID-19, in one way or another affecting all of us. SAP together with Deutsche Telekom subsidiary T-Systems was tasked by the German government with developing a contact tracing app using Apple & Google’s Exposure Notifications framework - Corona-Warn-App. I’m honored to have been part of this effort, working on an app that helps trace COVID-19 infection chains and notify users of their estimated risk level. Feedback from users has been overwhelmingly positive, and the app has been downloaded millions of times. Personally, the project has been a major development step for me - never before have I worked on an app as significant & impactful as Corona-Warn-App. More than usual, I scrutinize every line of code that I write. It’s completely open source on GitHub - which, I think, is extremely important for public trust and adoption of the app. Folks, especially in Germany, are very sensitive when it comes to privacy and I’m proud to say that in Corona-Warn-App, privacy and data protection are front-and-center.
SAP Campus App
Campus is one of our key apps, enabling lightning-quick access to all kinds of information about their office location. Functionality includes up to date and colorful floor plans of office spaces, a robust global search that works for everything from finding & booking meeting rooms, to locating colleagues’ workspaces on a map.
I’ve worked on both the frontend and backend of the app. On the iOS side, we use technologies/frameworks like MapKit, CoreLocation, and the SAP Fiori SDK for iOS to enable a completely dynamic experience to quickly pan & zoom to many SAP locations worldwide.
The backend is a RESTful API service running on the SAP Cloud Platform. A containerized infrastructure enables quick raster tile delivery, as well as rendering of tiles and CRUD API operations. An intelligent admin interface offers convenient data maintenance, and automated jobs synchronize master data with other internal services for up-to-date data.
SAP Academy App
SAP Silicon Valley is the home of the SAP Sales Academy, a program where we train the next generation of SAP sales colleagues. The Academy App is a key part of the students’ experience during the program. It offers functionality to view real-time program scores, an evaluation calendar, collaboration features, and a schedule builder.
Digital Signage tvOS
At SAP, we have a lot of screens everywhere in the office - often not displaying anything. Digital Signage is our own internal solution to put content on these devices - and an AppleTV is the perfect device for this. At ~$150, Apple TVs are cheap enough to place behind every screen, and have conferencing functionality and app support to boot. They’re also easily manageable with MDM.
Our Digital Signage solution supports many media formats, and playlists can be managed in a central place and pushed out to many devices at once.
Volunteering
There is a well-known Latin proverb Docendo discimus - “by teaching, we learn”. Especially in the past couple of years I’ve found this to be very much true. I enjoy programming, and sharing this with others I find to be very rewarding - and has helped me learn how to express myself more clearly and communicate more effectively.
Quarry Lane School FRC Team 7419
My journey began when a good friend of mine asked me if I’d like to volunteer as a judge for a FIRST Lego League (FLL) competition going on at a local school. FLL is one of several programs & competitions organized by FIRST that aims to introduce STEM concepts to children at an early age through a guided robotics program. Teams of students work together to build a LEGO MINDSTORMS©-powered robot that can compete for points vs another team on a closed playing field. Volunteering as a judge for competition weekend was incredibly fun, and since the following summer I’ve been a mentor with Quarry Lane School’s FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 7419.
Chinatown Community Development Center
Every Sunday is Coding Class - that means getting up bright and early to get into the city. That’s no problem though, because it means spending time with an awesome group of mentors & kids at CCDC. Through a grant, CCDC was able to purchase several MacBooks that we now use to teach students the fundamentals of iOS development using Swift. We started with basic programming principles in a classroom setting (a little more relaxed perhaps), and as time progressed moved to project work that the students picked themselves. Unfortunately the pandemic situation has forced us to not have in-person classes, but I think we’ve been able to make the best of the situation and have moved to a virtual format. Even with this challenge, I’m amazed at the progression of the students and the projects they’ve started 😀