Over the last years, I’ve sometimes also hopped on a stage to hold talks about stuff I’m excited about.
Next to reading and writing, speaking is another fascinating way to convey knowledge, but also to learn a lot yourself. Similar to writing, holding talks forced to me to understand topics on a very deep level. The fear to make a fool out of myself on stage triggered the perfectionist in me. So, I usually spent way too much time preparing these talks. But at least that made me feel confident when I as on stage, and it gave room to super interesting Q&A sessions.
Some talks and workshops I’ve held are listed below:
2022: VDE - Agile development of medical device software (MDR)
Software/apps that qualify as a medical device according to the Medical Device Regulation and is, therefore, regulated, needs to be built inside the scope of a Quality Management System. There are lots of norms like ISO 13485, IEC 62304, ISO 14971 and IEC 62366 that define how this should work. However, there is very little guidance on how to merge requirements of these norms with an agile development approach. Together with Alex (Regulatory Affairs Manager at QuickBird Medical), I gave a presentation of how this can look like in practice. The presentation was part of a seminar by the VDE, Europe’s largest technical-scientific association.
2022: UnternehmerTUM - How to successfully build and list a reimbursable Digital Health App (DiGA)
Getting a medical app reimbursed by health insurance used to be a very hard and long-winded endeavor. Most start-ups ran out of money before they even hit the market. In 2019, Germany did what no other country has done before: establishing a standardized fast-track for getting digital health applications into the reimbursement system of health insurances. In this talk, I gave an overview of how to build a Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and especially a DIGA that gets listed in the official DiGA-directory.
2022: Charite - The future of Diabetes apps based on SGB V §374a
§374a is a new paragraph that should force producers of medical devices to open up their data pools via an API. Charite invited QuickBird to give a short talk about the topic since we work with medical apps and interoperability a lot and also write articles about that topic. This was part of a bigger workshop that discussed the new law and its benefits and shortcomings.
2018: Paid 2-day Workshop about Eppleton IT Consulting
After my first workshop about Kotlin at Eppleton IT Consulting, I gave another one about RxJava. It was a small workshop with 4 people but the attendees were really excited about the topic and I loved the experience.
2018: Paid 1-day Workshop about MVVM on iOS & Android for the Süddeutsche Zeitung
We got invited to hold a paid workshop at the Süddeutsche Zeitung about MVVM after my previous talks about the topic. It was a lot of fun preparing and holding a practical, educative workshop about this topic. Especially, since the SZ developer team is just super nice, curious and smart. That’s the perfect audience for a workshop like that.
2018: Testing Mobile Apps at the “Agile Testing” Meetup
After my previous talks, Stefan (my co-founder at QuickBird) and me got invited to talk about testing mobile apps at the “Agile Testing Meetup” in Munich. The organizers Tobi and Johannes had a big Meetup group that usually attracted about 50 attendees per event and we really like the concept. No question that we did it.
2018: MVVM with Kotlin at the Kotlin User Group
My colleagues at QuickBird and me were really excited to apply the MVVM-programming-pattern (Model-View-ViewModel) to Android and iOS systems. We created a bunch of different concepts on how to apply it and used it extensively in our app projects. At that time, not many people knew how to apply MVVM to mobile Operating Systems yet.
Enqrique, the organizer of that the Kotlin User Group in Munich, liked that idea. The Kotlin User Group is the biggest meetup group for Kotlin developers in Munich. Giving a talk there was a lot of fun, and I loved the provocative & critical questions by some of the really smart guys attending.
2017: Paid 2-day workshop for a bunch of programmers of different companies about “Kotlin”
This was my first workshop where participants actually paid some good money to attend. That put pressure on me and gave way to my inner perfectionist again. I spend tons of time on the preparation of this workshop. And luckily, it worked out really well. Anton, the Managing Director of Eppleton IT Consulting offered me this opportunity, and I am still thankful for it.
2017: Intro to Kotlin at the “Nighthacking” Event by Eppleton IT Consulting.
This was an introduction to Kotlin and it’s advantages against Java. That was precisely the time when all of all the hype around Kotlin started. And it was a justified hype - what a beautiful programming language!
2014 “Smartwatch App Development” at Agora Space in Shanghai, China
I’ve spent two semesters abroad in China (Shanghai) during my studies. Right at that time, Android Wear, Google’s Smartwatch Operating System, has just been released in a beta status by Google. There was no Apple Watch yet and nobody really knew what a smartwatch is. People in the subway in China actually stared a lot at me when after I bought the first Android Wear smartwatch, the Moto 360 (it was a fight to get my hands on this one!).
I told Frederic, the managing director at Agora Space, about my passion and product plans for smartwatch apps (see SoundSnip). And he invited me to teach a bunch of 20-30 developers how to develop apps for these new devices. I was extremely scared by the idea of holding my first ever (tiny) public tech talk in a country I barely got used to yet. But I did it and got to know very interesting developers in that way. Thanks a lot, Frederic!