updated may 2026 · berlin

Now

A snapshot of what's holding my attention this season. Inspired by Derek Sivers's now-page idea - updated when life shifts, not on a schedule.

Work

On the Checking Account team at Trade Republic. The current focus is the transfer surface - SEPA, Bizum, and add-money flows via Adyen and Google Pay. Bizum launched end-to-end earlier this year: P2P by phone-number alias, Request-to-Pay, merchant payments. A surprisingly complete instant-payments surface to ship from scratch.

Alongside the team work, I've been running the Maestro E2E testing strategy across business-critical flows that Espresso couldn't reach due to third-party SDKs. That work became the Droidcon Berlin 2025 talk. Also wiring OpenTelemetry tracing and Grafana dashboards into our checking-account surface - getting visibility into what actually happens in production matters more than I used to think.

Speaking

Droidcon Berlin 2025 is done - the Maestro E2E talk went well and the questions afterwards were the right kind of hard. Taking a pause before committing to the next one. No confirmed talks for the rest of 2026 yet.

Community

Co-organising Grab & Grow, Trade Republic's monthly internal lunch-and-learn where anyone presents on anything - tech, life, hobbies. Running for two years now and still one of the better hours of the month.

Also checking in on Android KZ, the Android developer community I started in Kazakhstan. 1000+ members and still active.

Reading

• What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work? - Stephen Wolfram.

Learning

Working on German - aiming to reach B2.

Exploring Claude Code to automate parts of my development workflow and help the team move faster - from code generation to repetitive tooling tasks.

Not doing

Side projects. New framework debates. Conference travel beyond what's already on the calendar. Trying to stay honest about scope.