Sven Rüchel

Creative Coder

Creative unconventional thinker with passion for innovation and coding combined with more than 25,000 hours of work experience

I really enjoy programming - having spent many of my childhood years programming away in the basement. Many years later, I still have the same zeal for developing and implementing complex software solutions as I had back then.

I enjoy developing products - designing intuitive and effective user interfaces supported by intelligent workflows – which allow users to efficiently and comfortably perform tasks.

I enjoy helping people - I am delighted by every “thank you” I get after solving a certain problem. At the same time, I also enjoy supporting other software developers as they design and implement their solutions.

There are two hearts beating in my chest – one beats for software development, the other beats for product development. Therefore, the traditional professional title of “Software developer” doesn’t quite cut it. I feel that the concept of »Digital Designer« , developed by the digital association bitcom , comes very close to how I see my role.

Like a fashion designer – designing fashion with pen and paper to subsequently bring creations to life behind the sewing machine – I use pen and paper to design digital products, subsequently implementing them on my computer.

Why Maria & James?

 

It started with a problem that annoyed me more and more: in recent years, every day when I worked on my PC, I had to grapple with more and more information that reached me in increasingly different ways.

Over the years, traditional email was joined by more and more Web-based tools: project management tools, collaboration tools, bug trackers, IT monitoring and so on. Unfortunately, a lot of these admittedly useful tools feel obliged to terrorise you with innumerable email messages

The choice is generally between plague and cholera: if you don’t allow enough email messages to come in, you risk missing something important; if you allow too many email messages, you risk drowning in the flood of emails and the same thing happens: you miss some important bit of information.

Best are those friendly email messages along the lines of "There’s some new information – take another look at the website.”

It was with increasing frustration that I began to think about how to solve the problem. After some time, I came up with the idea of the personal desktop assistant.

 

I have a dream

When I finished high school, our graduating class published a graduation newspaper in which all the graduates were asked about their dreams for the future:

In the year 2000 you will be confronted with software developed by me on every street corner.

Life had something different in store for me, but the dream always remained.

*) The fly in the ointment was my father, who was headmaster of the high school at the time and every year competed with the local Catholic high school for new students.
 

When I was 12 years old, my uncle, who was studying electrical engineering at the time, got his first computer – a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Every Sunday, we would drive to my grandparents and I would watch over my uncle’s shoulder while he was programming. After a few weeks, I explained his programming errors to him.

For my 13th birthday, I got my first computer – a Sinclair ZX 81.

A degree in IT was on the cards until by coincidence I came across a copy of the magazine Wirtschaftsinformatik. In retrospect I have to say that was fortunate, because I decided to study business IT which gives me an interdisciplinary background.

After graduating, I worked from 1997 to 1998 as a webmaster at STERN magazine (stern.de). This was followed by two intensive years working as an IT manager for the Internet auction house ricardo.de.

Since the burst of the dotcom bubble, I have spent several years developing telephony communications solutions for the penal system. In addition, in recent years I become involved in various start-up projects.