I studied Computer Science at ETH Zürich (BSc and MSc) and have been working with code and people for over a decade. I enjoy being hands-on, and finding solutions that are as simple as possible, but no simpler. But the product is only a manifestation of the team building it. I can provide leadership and mentorship, fostering an environment where the team feels safe to grow, experiment, and iterate.

Employment

Since 2025: Senior Full-Stack Engineer at Everyman, Zürich

• As the third engineer at the fast growing startup, I help evolve both the patient-facing website and app, and the internal platform.

2023-2025: CTO at Spatz (formerly Polaris News), Zürich

• Startup building up a user-generated hyper-local news platform. We followed the lean startup methodology, rapid prototyping, user-centered design, business model generation, etc. I hired part of the team, and implemented the product using Astro, SolidJS and Supabase.

2019-2023: Technical team lead front-end at Tamedia, Zürich

• Tamedia is one the largest media groups in Switzerland. As the technical team lead for the web front-ends and native apps, my team of 11 developers is responsible for the platform delivering 13 websites, including www.tagesanzeiger.ch. Our frontend service handles a sustained load of 150k reqs/min, with peaks exceeding 500k. Within Tamedia, our team pioneered a CI/CD workflow with feature-branch-deployments, and auto-deployment to production as soon as a feature is merged.

• I helped grow the skill-sets of my team members, and by building trust, significantly improved communication and processes between various teams and stakeholders. One of the first things I did was to move our team and our Next.js codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript. One of the last things was to move the development of our native apps in-house; hired one iOS and one Android dev, re-architected the apps as hybrid apps (Swift/Kotlin plus WebViews) and as promised, launched within a year.

2018-2019: Software engineer at Fision Technologies (since acquired by Zalando), Zürich

• Fision Technologies was a startup offering an app to take photos of your body, from which a 3D-model was constructed, which was used to give size-recommendations for clothes when online-shopping. I was working on both the React front-end, and Python back-end services.

2015-2018: Co-founder and full-stack developer of 2324.ch, Zürich

• My co-founder and I won an Impact Hub Zürich Fellowship with the idea of 2324.ch – a participatory hyper-local online news-platform. We quickly acquired four paying municipalities. Unfortunately, that was not enough to sustain our growth vision, so we decided to sell our company to Crossiety, a startup sharing our vision of an online village square.

• In addition to forming our team and product strategy, I implemented both front- and back-end. My decision to go with a simple and proven stack (Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and some React) served us well, and allowed us to quickly iterate on the product.

Previous jobs

• 2017-2018: Haskell developer for qua-kit at the Chair of Information Architecture, ETH Zürich

• 2015: Software engineer at mp technology, Zürich

• 2014: Internship at Silk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

• 2011-2014: Webmaster of the Departement of Computer Science at ETH Zürich

• 2012: Summer internship at 28msec, Palo Alto, California, USA

Education

• 2013-2014: Master of Computer Science at ETH Zürich

• 2008-2013: Bachelor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich

• 2005-2006: Exchange year in Norway (high school in Kristiansund)

• 2003–2008: High school: Kantonsschule Romanshorn, Switzerland

• 1995–2003: Basic education in Horn, Switzerland

Select Projects

• 2025: Mastro – a no-dependencies, no-build-step static site generator and web framework.

• 2014-2021: regular contributor to pandoc, a universal document converter.

• 2019: PanWriter, a Markdown editor with pandoc integration.

Experience

• Programming languages:

  • extensive experience: TypeScript/JavaScript (Astro, Solid, React, Next.js, Express.js, kysely), Haskell, Ruby (Rails and Jekyll), Python, HTML/CSS, SQL
  • some experience: Rust, Java, PHP, C/C++

• Technologies used in production:

  • Databases and services: PostgreSQL, MongoDB Atlas, AWS (S3, CloudFront, Beanstalk, EC2), Datadog cloud monitoring, GitHub, GitLab, CircleCI, Netlify
  • OpenAPI (tsoa API and client generation), Storybook, JWTs, HTTP streaming (for both HTML and JSON/SSE), unit- and integration tests

• Open source: github.com/mb21 and stackoverflow.com/users/214446 (>40k rep)

• Writing: mb21.github.io/blog

• Talks: Pandoc at HaskellerZ

Languages

• German: native language

• English: Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English Grade A

• Norwegian, Swedish: fluent