From retail to
software engineering.

The foundation

My professional story started far from keyboards and code. It started behind a counter in food retail. From 2013 to 2020 I worked in butcher shops and meat sales, eventually completing a full apprenticeship as a Fachverkäufer and working in the trade for nearly six years.

Those years taught me more than I realised at the time. Working directly with customers every day, you learn to communicate clearly, solve problems under pressure and pay attention to the details that matter. Managing grilling catering services taught me project management and what customer satisfaction actually costs. And the apprenticeship itself showed me I was capable of mastering a craft when I committed to it.

But throughout those years technology was always pulling at me. I spent my free time learning about computers, exploring Linux, and wondering what it would be like to build software instead of just using it. By 2020 I knew I had to make a change.

The transition

At 25 years old I made one of the best decisions of my life: I enrolled in a two-year apprenticeship program in IT system integration at IBB Institut für Berufliche Bildung. Starting over in a completely new field was humbling, but I was determined to prove I could do it.

Those two years were intense. I learned networking fundamentals, system administration, troubleshooting methodologies, and got my first real exposure to programming in a formal setting. More importantly, I discovered that I had found what I was meant to do. The problem-solving, the logical thinking, the satisfaction of building something that works. It all clicked.

As part of the program I needed six months of professional experience. Shopware gave me that chance in Customer Support. I graduated in June 2022 as a Fachinformatiker and immediately started my first real tech job at the same company.

The growth

Joining Shopware as a Support Specialist in June 2022 was the beginning of everything. I was hired to help customers solve technical problems with Shopware 5 and 6, and I threw myself into learning everything I could about the platform.

Support work is where you really learn a system. You see every edge case, every unusual configuration, every way things can break and every way to fix them. Within eight months I had proven myself valuable enough to be promoted to Support Expert in January 2023, with a salary increase that reflected it.

Over the next two years I became known as the person who could solve the tricky problems. I developed deep knowledge of both Shopware 5 and 6 architectures, learned the codebase inside and out, and built strong relationships with customers and internal engineering teams alike.

Along the way something kept nagging at me: we all spent a lot of time setting up test environments. So I built something to make that easier, a self-service portal that lets people set up their own. Shopware Build was born, not as an assigned project, but as something I saw needed to exist.

The tool was effective enough that other teams started asking for access. What began as my fix for a support problem grew organically across the organisation, until it was clearly no longer just a helpful side tool. It had become critical infrastructure that deserved dedicated engineering attention.