🇩🇪 Based near Berlin, Germany · Working at the intersection of AI and publishing
I spent a decade at TU Berlin researching adaptive UIs and distributed AI. Now I lead engineering teams, rethinking how we build software alongside AI.
- I lead engineering at CHAPTR (Holtzbrinck Publishing Group), building AI-powered products for the publishing industry
- I care deeply about developer experience, codebases AI can reason about, and teams that grow with their tools
- I believe AI in software development is the next great abstraction layer - and I'm building for that future every day
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Director of Software Engineering - CHAPTR Building reedy.ai - AI-powered metadata optimization for publishers. Improving discoverability, making large book catalogs semantically searchable, and optimizing for platforms like Amazon. Focus: developer experience, AI-compatible codebase architecture, bridging product and engineering.
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Startup Mentor & Advisor Helping early-stage founders make sound technical decisions - from architecture and team setup to AI strategy. Drawing on 15+ years of building, scaling, and sometimes breaking things at startups.
- PhD in Distributed Artificial Intelligence - TU Berlin's DAI-Labor, researching adaptive UIs across devices and modalities (voice, touch, gestures, smart environments) - what we'd now call generative UI
- Advised 13 PhD students during my time leading the Human-Computer Interaction research group
- Scaled a smart home engineering team from 2 to 18 engineers at yetu AG
- CTO at smartB Energy Management - raised funding and built an IoT platform for commercial energy management
- CTO & Advisor for multiple Berlin-based startups in sustainability and IoT
- Traveled the world for 2 years after completing my PhD
- Left Berlin for Brandenburg, raising chickens and kids, growing vegetables, building a home.
I see AI as the latest level of abstraction in software:
Punch cards → Assembler → Higher-level languages → Libraries & open source → Generative AI ← we are here
I build for codebases AI can reason about: simple folder structures, documentation about the why not just the what, established best practices, and tests as the ultimate lifeline.
I sometimes write and think about:
- How AI is changing engineering workflows
- Building developer experience that scales
- Greenfield projects and when to start fresh
- The publishing industry meets AI
| Area | Technologies |
|---|---|
| Coding | Cursor, Claude Code |
| Frontend | React, React-Native, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind CSS, TanStack Query |
| Backend | Python, Firebase, Pydantic, Typesense, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL |
| AI & ML | Anthropic Claude, OpenAI, LangChain, Cohere, Google GenAI |
| Infrastructure | Github Actions, GCP, Terraform, Azure |
| Practices | Vitest, Playwright, Cypress, CI/CD, Feature Flags |
I maintain a collection of browser-based AI experiments exploring local LLMs running entirely in the browser via WebGPU. Check them out at blumendorf.info/lab.