About me
Hello 👋 – I am Marian
Born 1977, living in Rösrath near Cologne, Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany. Son, brother, father, partner. Designer (taught)/engineer (self-taught) with a focus on user experience.
If you care about pronouns, mine are: he / him / his.
Becoming a parent, they say, changes everything. And it’s true. Since my daughter was born in 2016, I feel like almost everything I do, I do for her to some degree. And it got me a lot more worried about the direction we are heading with our planet. I can’t help but think what unlikely coincidence it was that on this tiny planet it was possible that life as we know it could evolve. We are obliged to do everything we can to sustain the results of this coincidence.
So sustainability is a theme occupying my mind, and I’m constantly thinking about ways to reduce my own consumption of resources, as well as influence our politics in a favourable way. I’m a member of the German party Bündnis 90/Die Grünen and contribute to the party’s digital infrastructure via Netzbegrünung.
Endurance sports has changed my life and my perspective on how we are able to develop our own capabilities. I am a passionate cyclist, both active (road, cyclocross, mountain bike) and as a follower of the professional sports (road, cyclocross). Coping with constant time constraints, I would always love to ride more, but I’m happy with getting my workouts done consistently on the smart trainer and being out for an occasional ride, an occasional sportive event. Find me on Strava.
Since 2015 I’m working for Giant Swarm, a remarkable company founded by remarkable people in Cologne in 2014. We provide a managed cloud-native stack, based on Kubernetes, including self-service user interfaces. Since roughly 2016 we are completely distributed. We have a diverse team with a global perspective. If you’re curious, check out the job offerings on our website!
I have started using the Web and building content for it around 1996, when I still went to school. My first job in the industry, which started as an internship, started a year later. I understood it as part of my job to learn about new technologies and services, and tried out everything I could on my own. I had a personal account on nearly every social media platform. But since then, I have also seen that enterprises like Google/Alphabet, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter gained a lot of power and control over our lives, the ways we exchange information, and how we form our opinions. I’ve become very critical of these effects and slowly but surely decided that I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. After years of inactivity on Facebook, I finally decided to cut the connection entirely and deleted my account. I’m also no longer using Twitter. Instead I’m exploring and advocating the fediverse and the decentralized alternatives it has to offer. I fight little battles against WhatsApp in my private life. And I run this personal place on the web, which I consider controlled by myself, mostly.