Most of my job is watching smart engineers argue about technology when the real problem is that nobody talked to the customer first.
I'm Jan. I started as a software engineer, became an engineering lead, and now work as a Solutions Architect at MongoDB. The career arc taught me one thing:
The technology is almost never the bottleneck. Knowing what to build is.
Background
The Hard Way
I spent years making tutorials on YouTube. Building things nobody asked for. Setting up email capture forms. Writing content calendars. I did everything the "build an audience" playbook told me to do.
I had creator burnout.
The channel didn't fail because I wasn't technical enough. It failed because I was building for myself, not for anyone with an actual problem.
Now I start with the customer. What's their pain? What are they already trying to do? Then I figure out how technology can get them there faster. That shift changed everything — my career, my writing, how I think about what's worth building.
Convictions
What I Believe
The technology is almost never the bottleneck.
Most projects fail because nobody figured out what the customer actually needs. Not because the stack was wrong.
Nobody got promoted for writing clean code.
They got promoted for shipping things that mattered. Code is the means. Business impact is the end.
If you can't explain why a customer would pay for it, you're not ready to build it.
This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it. Including me, for years.
Shipping isn't the hard part. Shipping the right thing is.
I've shipped plenty of things that nobody wanted. The skill isn't building fast — it's knowing what to build.
The best engineers think end-to-end.
From the customer's problem to the deployed solution and everything in between. Not just the code in the middle.
Writing
What You'll Find Here
Everything I've learned about shipping things people actually want to pay for. How to stop guessing what customers need. How to bridge the gap between "I built a cool thing" and "people are throwing money at me."
Some of it comes from my work at MongoDB. Some of it comes from my own failures. All of it is real.
Get in touch
Say hello
For architecture discussions, speaking invitations, or MongoDB-related conversations — LinkedIn is the fastest way to reach me. For everything else, email via the imprint.
I sometimes present at local MongoDB events and tech meetups.
Berlin · 52.52° N, 13.41° E