Hey everyone! I’ve got some exciting news to share. My book, “Start/Up: Set the net on fire,” is now finally available in English. 🎉

This novel has been a labor of love, deeply rooted in my own experiences in the German start-up scene of the early 2000s. It follows Mark Cain, an elite student who dives headfirst into the bizarre and often ruthless start-up world, where loneliness and cutthroat competition are the norms.

The journey to this English release has been quite the adventure. I originally wrote the book almost a decade after my first start-up, “Bazaaria,” which was, to put it mildly, a financial drain. That experience, filled with feelings of powerlessness and shame, contrasted sharply with the success many of my friends found in the industry. It was a rough time, but it also set me on a path to success in e-commerce and AI.

Translating the book after 4 years gave me a fresh perspective on the characters and story, allowing me to reflect deeply on the highs and lows of entrepreneurship. I’m incredibly proud of how it turned out and excited to share it with a broader audience.

It makes for a compelling read! You can find “Start/Up: Set the net on fire” on Amazon.

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Today, I’ve come to a realization. My two-decade tenure as a developer has been fulfilling, but I now realize: thanks to AI, it is over.

Let me explain: AI has always fascinated me. I love Jurassic Park, afterall, of course I would. But for some reason, when machine learning started getting some traction in 2018, my initial reaction was indifference.

Up to this point I had only worked with deeplearning4j and tried my luck with a project titled “minime” using a self-compiling piece of java code and a rules engine. But when I first heard about machine learning and got in touch with people actively scanning my project scipioerp on github for generative AI, I couldn’t really see the usefulness.

I was an expert developer myself, with 20 years of experience by now. Of course AI couldn’t do what I did. At least not in its complexity. But eventually I forced myself to use it. Really use it and once ChatGPT3 came around I suddenly saw the writing on the wall: my days as a developer were over.

That’s when I teamed up with my dear friend Felix Schmidt to found Jarvex.net. Jarvex will be our way of embracing our own future. We want to see AI being adopted sooner rather than later and be a positive force in our society.

As a first outlet, we are also founding AIVory, a first digital agency that works without employing developers. My role is now transitioning from developer to AI collaborator.

This is probably the most significant change in my career ever since I founded Ilscipio and I am not even sure where this new route will take me. I only know, this just feels right.

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Hey there! It’s been a while and boy, have things been busy. Life has a knack for throwing curveballs, and sometimes, things can fall through the cracks. This website is one of them. It mysteriously disappeared during a server migration back in 2016. Simply put, I had not really invested much time in maintaining it for years prior and lo and behold, it simply got forgotten when we did one of the many migrations at my company ilscipio

Once that I noticed that it was lost, it still took me months to find the proper time to even begin with a “fresh” start. All the original template and data had been lost, afterall.

But I finally decided to use it as an experiment to accustom myself with the Hugo CMS. And thanks to the wayback machine and some limited files I still had stored somewhere, I managed to redo the original design (with slight modifications) and rework all the original content. So here it is - the new, old, refurbished personal website of mine!

Now that I got this over with, I promise (sorta), to occasionally update it with more of my stuff. I did a thing or two in the time inbetween, so yaaaay.

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I recently stumbled upon a great article byJoystiq.com which centers around the great Trespasser remake that s13n1 has been making over at TresCom.org. I am an enormous fan of Jurassic Park, as you may already have guessed, and as such I was quite touched. 

I was asked to give a few statements for the author and of course I was happy to oblige - it seriously feels just great to see the community coming up with these awesome additions all the time. The full article is definately worth your while and can be accessed here.

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Last week we launched CATO, a full ERP solution. Needless to say, the product took alot of effort on our end and we are slowly beginning to advertise it. On the forefront, we just launched a small ad-campaign in the german Harvard business manager: 

The ad features both Michael and I in the background - the actual model, was shot on a separate day. The entire planning was quite fun and I can only hope that it will spark some interest. 

If interested, head over to www.cato-commerce.com to see what it is all about!

Update 2023

This is an original post from 2014, we have since renamed CATO to “Scipio ERP” and added a loooooooong list of new features to it!

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Recently, I was asked to come aboard the Jurassic Park podcast “Ramblings of A Ingen Historian” to talk about the history of TresCom. Since i am a huge Jurassic Park enthuasiast and would do anything for  the community, I absolutely loved the experience. 

We covered quite alot of topics, ranging from the beginnings of the community to the recent “feud” there was with another jurassic park website.

If you want to listen to the podcast, follow this link.

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A few months ago I was given the opportunity to write for the german “Java Magazin”. They asked for an article on the popular Apache OFBiz - the first level ERP system by the Apache Software Foundation I am such a big fan of. Being an avid reader myself I was smitten. Afterall, even though we forked Scipio ERP from it in 2014, we did so out of love for the initial project!

The article I ended up writing gives a basic overview over the material at hand, gives short code examples to the most interesting aspects of the software and also analyses the pros and cons quite a bit. So if you have been looking for a great open-source business solution, perhaps you should check the article. Of course it is also available at your local bookstore.

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Doing shadows on boxes is quite a hassle within CSS. Though modern browsers support this in one form or antoher, it is tedious to look up the actual style property the few times you actually use them. If you want to support the lesser IE versions, it quickly spawns into a real nightmare.

Well, I looked into this a while back and created a fun little generator to play around with. By dragging a sun around, a complete set of CSS is generated for you that is safe to use with most browsers. In general it should support most modern Browsers & Internet Explorer down to IE7.

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It took me some time to get back onto writing guest articles. The main reason was that despite how much I enjoy doing this, it tends to be one of those things that get out of focus for a while, then instantly pop up and bite you in the ass again. So here’s my latest addition:

5 Gründe gegen Alles-Könner

Unfortunately, it happens to be a german article on the topic of why people tend to overlook extenral help within their startups or, even worse, have the tendency to evaluate it differently.

P.S.: If interested, also read up on Innovationswüste Deutsches Internet

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Being focused on several pitches and ilscipio related tasks, I didn’t really get around doing much fun for a little while… if it wasn’t for a tiny app by the name of Browseo Mobile. 

Browseo, as you may know, has been an incredible success so far. As a tool for SEO-professionals, we launched the app almost a year ago to a wider audience. Before, we had developed the tool for internal means and never had a market in mind. It came to our big surprise that Browseo was wildly acknowledged by SEO-Experts all around the globe. Since its launch the response has been overwelming: we received mails from the big ones (Rand Fishkin & Garrett French - thank you so much for the great correspondance), plenty of tweets and were contacted by companies of various huge brands. 

It is a great feeling to be developing something like this for a change that an entire industry can enjoy. So one weekend, Jonathan asked me to think about a mobile app. He enjoyed using the application on his mobile phone and hence was asking if we could be doing something like this along the side… I loved it.

So I made my way through a set of android docs and got to work. I used a small library called Phonegapwhich I can highly recommend and what do you know we managed to launch it all to the general public within two days. So if you happen to have an android phone, please give it a try- it’s free!

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