Meet the 2024 Champion Matthias Heicke, who is the Co-Founder and CTO of Sweap. Sweap is a business event management solution enabling their clients to run events without the busy work. As CTO, Matthias is directly involved in all topics regarding the product and the underlying software architecture. Before this he founded another company in the event market and worked as freelancer for several Berlin Start-Ups as well as grown companies. Matthias and his team believe in a healthy mix of well-proven technology, like Java and Spring, and modern solutions like Kubernetes, IBM cloud, server less, etc. resulting in scalable and maintainable systems. His personal focus lies on holistic user experience and the drive of making things better day by day. He finds great contentment in the software development and start-up world by knowing that his creations are adding value to people’s lives. For the same reason, his mission is to create, and according to him the opportunity to create incredible solutions which were just not possible 10 years ago amazes him every day!
His organisation makes great use of IBM Cloud Code Engine for handling their traffic (for example sending out one million unique emails with attachments per month and not losing a single one of them) - but he is delighted about watsonx too! His favourite form of advocacy is speaking at conferences since he likes the in-person opportunities to interact with people.
Matthias has almost 16 years of experience in the IT industry and here is his comment on giving back to the Community; “I think software development always has been and will be a place to share knowledge, help each other out and create new things. Sharing is very important in this community, and IBM - being a strong advocate for open source - is a great place to give back to the community”. He has been a part of the start-up world for almost 10 years now and here is a story that he is particularly proud of; “I wrote a rather complicated vacation-booking-software from scratch for a small church group back in the days, only to find out, that they were still using it after 18 years, without a single update!”
If everything goes south, his plan B has been to become a shepherd in Ireland!
Lightning round:
· What would be your superpower and why? Saying yes to everything, no matter how stupid it sounds - because I believe every experience is a good one ... although some of them you only want to make once.
· Ice cream or cake? Cake - There's more variety.
· Cats or dogs? Definitely dogs.
· Summer or winter? One would be boring without the other.
· Morning or evening? Evening.
· eBook or paper book? Paper.
· TV shows or movies? Movies, if I find the time.
· A night out or a night in? Night out, but not too often in a row.
· Cannonball into the pool or dip a toe in first? Always Cannonball.
· Go-to karaoke song? Whatever is on, when someone pushs me on the stage!
· Drive or fly? Trains
Connect with Matthias in LinkedIn and Community page
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