Jakob, How Did You Come to Coding?

Today, we are sitting down with Jakob Lorz, a full stack engineer at vivenu. Jakob joined vivenu straight out of university, after several internships had already taken him into the manufacturing robot and cyber security spaces. In this interview, Jakob shares how he came to coding, what makes the ideal engineering culture, and his excitement about the features he is currently working on at vivenu.

How Did You Become Interested in Coding?

This is actually quite a funny story: My father used to code when he was in university, my mother is a teacher for math and economics, so I had an affinity for the STEM field early on.

As a young teenager, all my friends would play first-person shooter games. My parents naturally thought these games were too violent, so instead, my father showed me the basics of programming. Because I really wanted to play with my friends, I came up with a hack: If I programmed a shooter game and tested it with my friends, I thought, they really couldn’t say anything against it. In the end, I never programmed the shooter game.

Instead, I got started building apps. Starting with C# and Visual Studio, I quickly got interested in Java and web development. In school, I was incredibly lucky to have an amazing CS teacher who nurtured that interest. He assigned challenging projects and imparted the value of software as a tool for real-world applications. From there, I just went with it.

Why Did You Choose to Pursue Software Engineering?

I studied a combination of economics and computer science that is fairly unique to Germany. With a solid foundation in coding, this part of my studies came easy to me. The economics lectures stoked my interest in working at the intersection of the two fields.

Reflecting back on it, software, to me, is a tool to create actual, tangible business results. I always liked that.

How Would you Describe the Engineering Culture at vivenu?

If you are somebody who wants results, there are very few, if any, better places to work than vivenu. Our software is pretty complex, but the product’s architecture is designed to make sure that the vivenu platform is fast, adaptable, and open to new feature additions at all times. This is a solid foundation to build product rapidly. What’s more, the whole stack consists of technology I love and would choose for my own projects. This starts with Typescript and ends with Golang.

These choices enable us to iterate fast and deliver a consistent product.The other thing that excites me is that every single one of us on the engineering team truly owns their changes – which means I get to make a real impact and see the features I own in production pretty fast.

Last, but not least, the team is highly communicative and supportive: Whenever I’m stuck or unsure about a solution, I know I can ping a colleague and they will be there to provide efficient, solution-oriented feedback. Working with this team makes me better, faster, and more efficient every single day.

What are You Currently Working on that You are Most Excited About?

Without going into too much detail (stay tuned!), I think we are still in the early innings of realizing the full potential of the open platform approach that is at the heart of vivenu.Building the features leveraging this approach continues to be incredibly exciting and I can’t wait to see how our customers will make them their own.