About & Hire me #

Hi. I'm Marcel. I'm an independent software engineering consultant. I have a strong background in the clean energy sector (solar panels, electric vehicles). I've worked on data and monitoring platforms, custom business line software, and integrations. I focus on bringing simplicity, clarity, business-focus, and automation to the work I do.

Past projects #

• Greenfield EV charge-point management portal (Clojure)
• Greenfield data warehouse & analytics for 60k EV charge-points (Scala)
• Greenfield solar panel energy monitoring platform (20k systems, Serverless, Typescript)
• Tech lead for Boeing 747 predictive maintenance portal (Spark, Python)
• Tech lead for aircraft hangar scheduling: industrializing an AI prototype (Python)
• Lead for large refactor: rule engine for solar panel quotes (Typescript)
• Remotely start & stop an EV charging session (Scala)

Marcel did an excellent job in boosting our new Big Data team on Predictive Maintenance here at KLM. Right from the start, Marcel showed great technical skill, involvement, and enthusiasm. Eager to perform and coach the people around him, he kick-started our initial efforts and helped us deliver Prognos - Big Data platform for predictive maintenance analysis.
— Wouter Kalfsbeek, Big Data Project Manager at AirFrance/KLM

Marcel's enthusiasm to understand the bigger picture and drive to come to the best solutions made it a pleasure working together. Combined with his structured and thorough way of working he is sure to get the job done!
— Joost de Wit, Marketing lead at Sungevity

Short bio #

I studied computer science at ETH Zurich & Charles University in Prague. After flirting with academic research, and management consultancy, I returned to engineering.

I did projects in Scala, Python, Javascript/Typescript, Clojure, and worked with many stacks: backends, frontends, cloud, dev-ops, machine-learning. There was a period I focused on open-source, some examples are here, here, and here.

You can find more on my LinkedIn profile.

Values #

To bring more color in how I approach work, here are things that I value. While I value things on the right, in most cases it is the values on the left that I value more:

• Intimate collaboration with business and a product owners over the benefits of exclusive focus on coding
• Systemic long-term resolution of one issue over short-term resolutions of multiple issues
• Time constraints over delivery estimates
• Slower but aiming for clarity & simplicity over faster but dragging on with existing confusion & complexity
• Business impact over successful scope delivery
• Collaborative brainstorming and idea capturing over presenting
• Known failure modes of boring technology over unknown unknowns of innovative, beneficial technology
• Embarrassing short bets over an enticing roadmap

Code:

• declarative & immutable over imperative & mutable
• duplicated over shared across a boundary
• understandable over performant or short
• specific over abstract
• expression of current understanding over preparation for unknown future
• cohesive by domain over cohesive by layer
• explicit over implicit
• failing early over failing late
• close to the business domain over close to conventions

Key influences #

These people profoundly influenced my engineering and thinking:

• Rich Hickey, Simple Made Easy. A game-changing influence on my engineering.
• Ray Dalio, Principles. Figure out once, and move on.
• Nassim Taleb, The Incerto series. Turning uncertainty into advantages. Applicable to both engineering & life.
• Alberto Brandolini, EventStorming. Preventing waste by collaborative alignment.
• Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person. Mind-bending views on education and leadership.

Honorable mentions:

• Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture and Time Management.
• Marshall Rosenberg, Nonviolent Communication.
• Peter Attia, Outlive

Contact me #

I'm on LinkedIn and my email address is m@marcel.is.

Subscribe via email or RSS to get updates about future posts.