The Times They Are A Changin’

Christoph Ott
9 min readFeb 19, 2018

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“Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin’.
Please get out of the new one
If you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’.” — Bob Dylan

It’s now more than 3 years ago that I got the courage to throw all in a hat and to start my own business.
A couple of years later I transformed into a limited liability company (GmbH) and so it’s time to review the past and focus on a new vision & strategy.

“Two "one-way" signs with arrows going different ways on a street in New York” by Brendan Church on Unsplash

Get the party started, The need to start something new — April 2015

Here I am, 30 years young, finally engaged and father of two beautiful kids. Actually I am happy in my job … kind of.

I had an amazing software developer job with awesome colleagues, but after 8 years my entrepreneur blood started to take over.

The whole startup / entrepreneur lifestyle have influenced me and I met tons of young brilliant minds at meetups and events. Old school friends started their own businesses with which they had huge success and television broadcasted one dream creating show after another.

A big Change was needed and so I had to leave my comfort zone and start from zero. The first days were scary and rough. “What doesn’t kill you make stronger” — this phrase turned out to be true.

First of all I had to burn the bridge behind me. I worked 8 years in the .NET Microsoft CRM area and earned my place in the community.
It’s a fantastic product and I love .NET, but after so many years, I wasn’t happy any longer to work with it.
Javascript was already everywhere and NodeJS showed up on my radar. It was love at the first sight.
So I said to myself: “No more MS CRM in my life”.

I feel blessed and I want to thank my old colleagues and my boss from k.section for the experience I gained. You shaped the man I am today. Thanks for everything!

Before I went into the typical freelancer business, I played around with some startup ideas. I’ve “created” SumoWin, a QR consumer product. It was a nice little project but I found out quickly, how hard it is to get something going and to earn real money with it. At this time my business network was non-existent and so just one month later, I’ve started Lean-Coders, with a total other focus. With Lean-Coders I switched to the freelancer business and offered my programming skills.

Starting from the bottom I finally found a tremendous agency named Emakina (formerly known as Diamond Dogs). It was my first big contract and Lean-Coders was able to make some impact. It was an amazing time with brilliant people around me. In just 6 months we created one of the biggest websites in Austria. I’ve learned so much and I will be forever grateful that I had the opportunity to work with such a great team and the kickoff to my career.

While working from 9–5 there, I knew I had to do more. I started to give .NET courses and found smaller companies whom I offered maintenance contracts for general computer support. After a while I also had some smaller projects where I created websites for all professions. After several months working 24/7, I knew I needed help.

Like a gift from heaven, one of my .NET students called and informed me that her son is really talented and would love to learn how to code. I haven’t hesitated one second. I called Niki on the next day and was amazed by this young brilliant kid. He was charming, whitty! and damn talented. Niki’s skillset was already really wide and profound.
So while Niki was still in school I hired him part-time. He took over the smaller support jobs and my customers loved his engagement. And since then, I never had to help him out. He rocked it and gave me time to focus on new adventures.

One of my best friends got into the bitcoin business and converted me from a heavy skeptical guy to be a believer in this enormous disrupting technology. The rest of my best friends & myself funded his idea — it was one of the best business decisions I’ve ever made (lucky bastard).

Crazy, but that’s how it goes. — Ozzy Osbourne,Crazy Train — Nov 2015 till now

“Whatever it takes typography on black felt board frame on white wall” by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

It was a difficult decision but I had to build up a reputation and to widen my network. 6 Months after Emakina, I’ve began to work as a freelancer for the biggest public transport company in Austria. Thanks to my résumé, I’ve completed the interview process positive and I’m still working in this vast and ambition project.

Finally I was able to code for money with my beloved Node.js. I’ve never experienced such an extensive project, it was a match in heaven. Never before it felt so natural to fit into an already existing codebase. Thanks to my new colleagues and skillful team leaders the task to work there, still doesn’t feel boring and challenges me every day.
It feels crazy, to write only good impressions. I am totally honest with you. Since I began my solo career, I’ve only worked with awesome teams. I just say karma. So I am feeling lucky again that I landed at a place with many brilliant minds where I was introduced to a new technology called Typescript. At first I was skeptical. Due to my many years with .NET and JAVA I was irritated, because I enjoyed the non typing nature of Javascript. I was so wrong. Typescript saved my ass and created a new mindset for me. I was able to use my knowledge of design patterns and layer architecture and could help to refactor a lot of code.

Really fast I got the reputation of a code quality nagging spirit. Linting, Testing, Code Standards everything was accepted really well. Thanks to my colleagues I’ve learned many new things about all this issues and how to get better as a team every day in incremental steps. I am still getting goosebumps when I am thinking of how many downloads and usage our “little” application is handling daily. I never was more happy with my project, and I’m still reaching for more. The blockchain and bitcoin technology already infected me as well as all the new typescript stuff I wanted to use in other projects. I’ve always dreamt about my own framework or bootstrap project that I could use for all kind of business software, like CMS, CRM and Webshops. So I gathered some professionals I’ve met in meetups and started to create some small open source projects. It’s headed nowhere, but I used all the learnt techniques to offer new services.

I’ve landed several web programming shops for different crypto currency companies. The best part here, was that we get so much freedom in the whole software product process. We were not only hired for provide code, we also provide everything from hosting to 2nd level support — the whole 360° experience. So new skills had to be equipped. Docker and Kubernetes were the new shit and so we heavily focused on these tools. Nowadays we have a decent software continuous integration platform with Github, Visual Studio Online and Azure.

Again I was working 24h a day, so it was time to find new talents. Lean-Coders pitched on several job recruiting sessions at universities and colleges. It was big fun, but I realized that the result
was not like expected. It was again a lucky coincident, that I found my next Lean-Coders Member. One of my customers introduced Stefan to me, he was meant to do the project on his own, but in this time of his life, he was not ready to face this new challenge alone.

Stefans coding job experience was non-existent, but he had an enormous will to learn. I knew that he was special and that all he needed was a chance. So I teach him everything that I know about Javascript, Typescript and Software architecture. It was a challenging time because I had to work from 9–5, several side projects going and also needed to help Stefan to get into the right direction. Additionally some personal events hit Stefans life, which delivered a lot of drama, but I am really proud how he handled everything and showed, that he is a real warrior.

I think that we all grow threw these challenges. Stefan helped me a lot with side projects, but it was time for him to step up his game. So he joined me at ÖBB and he is working there as a frontend developer. He is killing it there and got great feedback. Niki has just finished with his one year civil service in time and transformed from a part-time support engineer to a full time coding ninja. He took up the challenge and always embraced the opportunity.

So while Stefan and Niki are coding like machines, the support jobs needed new blood. At one of the job recruiting sessions, I met a another talent. Like a stalker, I followed Samuels twitter handle and wrote him, if he wants to work as part-time support engineer. After some discussions, he agreed and is currently replacing Niki. Samuel already helped us with some website projects as well. I am pretty sure that his enormous javascript and security know-how will lead to great new opportunities. I cannot wait until he finishes school and can take the next steps.

The next lucky strike hits up on my facebook wall. In a developer facebook group, a member wrote about a friend which is currently searching for a new web designing job. When I read this announcement I was all in. One of my many flaws is designing. I mean with the right template, I can recreate everything. Designing a blank page without any material to copy from, is a different story. So I had already some talks with some recruits that I wanted to work with me, but they always chose to work for bigger companies. I took the chance and wrote Manuela a private message. She sent me some of her work and convinced me from the first second. I asked her to meet and to talk about job opportunities. Due to my full calendar I had to reschedule the meeting two weeks later than planed and one week later she wrote me, that she already joined a new company. I never felt a denial so frustrating, because I knew that her talents will bring her to the top. Before she was able to cancel the meeting with me, I convinced her to still meet and to be her plan B, if the new job doesn’t fit. It was a funny meetup and I haven’t stoped texting with her. I think I wrote her every day, until the day where Manuela phoned me and asked if the job was still open. This felt like the biggest steal of all time. Now I can relate with sport managers and how they feel when they steal an amazing talent from the big brands. I was so happy. Manuela was the missing piece at Lean-Coders. She is a photoshop wizard and knows exactly what customers want. Her UI, UX Skills are tremendous and the effort she makes amazes me every day.

So here we are, 3 1/2 employees later, we are ready for every challenge. A lot of people are asking me from where the people I hire are working from. Thanks to Slack, Trello and Github everyone can work from home. We have daily standups and it works pretty good, even from remote. I am trying to provide everybody with the right tools to perform. So everyone got a Dell XPS 13 (Ubuntu Edition), Webstorm, Office 365 Package, Bose Headphones and Long-Boards.

The whole Lean-Coders Team wants to thank every customer, partner, colleague, friend and family member that we can achieve all of this. Please don’t think that I am just a lucky dude. Don’t get me wrong. I am a lucky bastard and a lot of stuff was not planed. Everything was combined with a lot of work and tons of meetings, discussions and many denials and rejections. Everytime something good happened, I had to go trough some pretty rough challenges and the are many more to come.

So this was my review of the last three years. I am humbled and grateful for everything. The next blog post will be about our future plans. We will also contribute some technical posts about Typescript, Blockchain, NoSQL DB, Docker and Kubernetes.

Cheers,
Christoph

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Christoph Ott

Geek, Nerd, Father, Tech addicted, Padawan of Life … Company Twitter Handle: @Lean_Coders