I studied mathematics at the RWTH in Aachen. There I was the architect and project leader for the development of the system GAP, which is a system to investigate certain mathematical structures - so called groups. Since then I have been working in CS, in almost every possible role: as a programmer, project leader, product owner, responsible for a data center, director of IT, head of innovation department at a very large company, etc. The role that I enjoy most is as an architect. And now I enjoy doing this at triAGENS (of which I am one of the three owners/executives). Both consulting others and developing the architecture of our multi-propose, multi-model, non-relational, open-source database: ArangoDB.