visitor@jan-guenzel: ~/about

~/about

$ cat about.md

whoami

I'm Jan, a 24-year-old developer from Germany. A lot of the time I'm heads-down on my own, but just as often I'm building something with a small group of friends I've worked with for years. That rhythm — focused solo stretches, then bouncing ideas off people I trust — is exactly how I like to work.

What keeps me going is simple: try something new, learn from it, keep moving. I'd rather pick up an unfamiliar tool and figure it out the hard way than stay in my comfort zone — so there's almost always some half-finished experiment running in the background.

how it started

Like a lot of people in tech, my path into computers started with games — and one in particular pointed me toward code: Minecraft, built in Java. You could hop between servers or spin up your own, play with friends, and — the part that really hooked me — bend the game to your will with client- and server-side mods.

The thing was, the mods out there never did quite what I had in mind — there was always something I'd have built differently or added. So I started following YouTube tutorials to make my own. They were all in Java, which is how I picked up the language in the first place: by chasing the mods I could already picture in my head. It took a while, but eventually I didn't need the videos anymore — StackOverflow and I got to know each other very well, though :D.

Before long I needed somewhere to keep all the player data my mods were generating, so I taught myself MySQL — the go-to recommendation back then. That loop has driven pretty much everything since: I want something to exist, so I learn whatever it takes to build it.

git log --oneline

  1. nowfinishing my CS degree — and a company on the side

    My main focus right now is wrapping up a Bachelor's in Computer Science and getting the theory properly under my belt. The degree keeps pulling me into deep dives — most recently machine learning, where I wrote a whole paper on the Netflix Prize and recommender systems more broadly. Alongside it I run my own company focused on data automation, which keeps the hands-on side sharp. Solo when it counts, with friends when it's better that way.

  2. 2022agency work for names you'd recognise

    Several websites and web apps for well-known German brands, plus a long-running lead distribution & aggregation platform — a per-employee dashboard where I was the main coordinator between our client and an external dev team in India.

  3. 2021thrown in at the deep end at an agency

    Joined an agency and spent my first year as the second / taking-over dev on an app called TrainYourTown. Getting thrown in at the deep end turned out to be the best thing that could've happened — React Native, TypeScript, NestJS, microservices, MongoDB and cloud providers like Firebase, all at once.

  4. 2019CS-focused Gymnasium & first real teamwork

    Switched to a Gymnasium with a computer-science focus — Java again, but this time a real understanding of data structures and a first taste of time complexity. With two classmates I did an internship building fleet-control software: Angular with a Spring Boot backend, Docker and OpenShift.

  5. 2016a detour into the web

    Tried something new with HTML, CSS and JavaScript and put together some beginner sites with Bootstrap. I learned two things fast: the web is fun, and visual design is not my strong suit.

  6. 2014first lines of Java, for Minecraft

    Where it all started: writing my own Minecraft mods in Java because no existing one did exactly what I wanted, then picking up MySQL to store the user data behind them.

languages --by-usage

  • TypeScriptsince 2020
  • Javasince 2014
  • React / React Nativesince 2021
  • Node / NestJSsince 2021
  • MongoDBsince 2021
  • SQLsince 2015

uptime

Right now most of my energy goes into the last stretch of my CS degree — that's the focus. Around it I run my own company, automating the boring, repetitive data work that eats people's days. The pattern from the Minecraft days hasn't really changed: find something worth building, learn whatever's missing, ship it. And yes — I use Arch, btw.

thanks for reading — say hi on the board.