Oliver Sand

Hello, I’m a full-stack software developer from Hamburg, Germany! I’m passionate about building efficient and scalable software solutions and open-source development.

My approach emphasizes analytics-driven decision making and selecting the right tool for the job. Here’s a glimpse into my technical interests:

User interfaces: I leverage web technologies like React, TypeScript, and Node.js to craft intuitive and engaging user interfaces.
Cloud architecture: I’m adept at utilizing cloud platforms like Kubernetes or serverless architectures, keeping security in mind.
Performance and scalability with observability: I design systems with performance in mind that can scale effectively, with robust observability practices for deep insights.
Developer Experience (DX): Streamlined development processes that empower my colleagues are a core value.
Collision detection and 3D rendering with WebGL: Bringing complex interactions and graphics to life with WebGL is a fascinating challenge.
Dart enthusiast: I’m a long-time advocate for the Dart language, drawn to its simplicity, type safety, and robust tooling.
Open source contributions: I actively contribute to open source projects like backstage/backstage and google/vector_math.dart, along with smaller contributions to projects I frequently use.
Building personal projects: I enjoy creating my own projects, like the tentaclelabs/prometheus_client, a Dart library for publishing metrics to Prometheus.

Since 2023
Tech Lead at Plancraft GmbH
At Plancraft, a SaaS startup building a user-friendly software solution for small craft businesses, I thrive in the fast-paced environment of a growing startup. As a Tech Lead, I spearhead the development of new features, utilizing a diverse tech stack including React, Typescript, Firebase, Postgres, and Node.js. My focus extends beyond coding to ensure the product’s scalability and observability for long-term success. Furthermore, I provide leadership and guidance to my colleagues, fostering a collaborative and efficient development team.
Since 2023
Senior Software Engineer at Serrala Group GmbH
At Serrala, I leverage my technical expertise to consult with international developer teams working on the Alevate SaaS platform. This empowers them to navigate the complexities of modern software development. My focus is on optimizing their microservice stack and ensuring scalability through strategic planning. This includes guiding them on implementing load testing best practices, ensuring their applications can withstand real-world demands. Furthermore, I assist them in implementing robust observability practices for deeper system insights and efficient problem analysis.
2021-2023
Senior Software Engineer at Nordeck IT & Consulting
At Nordeck, I contributed to the development of communication tools based on open-source technologies like Matrix, Element, and Jitsi.
Specifically, I focused on OpenDesk, a project aimed at creating a modern workplace solution for the public sector in Germany. Aligned with the “public code for public money” principle, OpenDesk empowers users with autonomy, independence, and control over their data.
This project involved exploring the potential of the Matrix protocol beyond simple chat functionalities. I played a leading role in the technical design of the Matrix NeoBoard. This innovative whiteboard facilitates real-time, distributed collaboration with conflict-free editing using CRDTs and WebRTC technology.
2018-2021
Software Engineer at SDA SE
During my time at SDA SE, I played a key role in accelerating the digitalization of the insurance sector. This involved building a platform and ecosystem, encompassing both the technical concepts and laying the groundwork for the platform’s microservice architecture. I also had the opportunity to broaden my skills across development, gaining experience in both front-end and back-end development, along with DevOps and operational practices.
Furthermore, I fostered knowledge sharing within the ecosystem by co-founding sda.dev, a platform providing documentation and teaching key concepts. Finally, I actively participated in the Spotify-founded CNCF project, Backstage. My contributions involved building and maintaining our internal developer portal and ecosystem service catalog, making it easier for developers to navigate the ecosystem.
backstage.io: https://backstage.io/
2016–2018
Software Engineer at Interautomation Deutschland GmbH
Interautomation develops software solutions for the public transport sector, tackling exciting technical challenges in a domain that directly impacts millions of people daily. I played a key role in building both their web-based control center software and a mobile app designed specifically for train conductors. This app empowers conductors with real-time information about their schedules, delays, and passenger counts, ultimately contributing to a smoother and more efficient public transport experience.
2015–2016
Research Associate at Fraunhofer IOSB-INA
After graduating with my Master’s degree, I embarked on a research journey focused on Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). My Master’s thesis explored the use of assistive systems for complex manual assembly tasks. This project sharpened my skills in user experience (UX) design, hand tracking with depth cameras, and projection-based user interface development. To see the concept in action, check out this demo:

Oliver's Posts

Lessons learned from “just” replacing a CMS

July 2, 2024

Last year, I began the process of replacing the content management system (CMS) that powers this blog. This turned out to be a year-long journey in which I rewrote most of the blog. Surprisingly, little changed visually, as the changes happened behind the scenes. This experience serves as a reminder that projects can take a long time when you are navigating uncertainties and trying to do too much at once.

Oliver Sand

Range queries in Firestore

January 15, 2024

I like Firestore because it’s an easy-to-use database. Especially because it’s easy to build queries that are just fast. It’s designed to work at scale - by providing queries that have a constant time, regardless of the query conditions. But if you have worked with Firestore before, you will know that this limits the types of queries you can do. This can make range queries, for example for calendar applications, a challenge.

Oliver Sand

Scale re-orderable lists

December 31, 2023

Creating a UI where a user can manually reorder items based on their needs is neat, but can be quite challenging to implement in the backend. One need to store the order of the items somehow. There are different approaches to doing this, but each of them has trade-offs when it comes to performance and scalability. In this post I want to explain my scenario, compare them, and choose the best implementation.

Oliver Sand

Be careful with performance.measure

May 3, 2023

I recently helped a team improve the performance of one of their services. They had already invested some time, but over time the performance was getting even worse! Their Node.js service was suffering from slow response times. At some point, the team added performance tracing using performance.mark() and performance.measure() to understand why the response time was so long. Little did they know that this would make things even worse…

Oliver Sand

Tools for drawing diagrams in Markdown

January 19, 2023

Markdown is a great format. I use it a lot for documentation. It’s much easier to keep documentation up to date by keeping it close to the code. Sure, Markdown has limited formatting features, but it helps to focus on the essential part, the content. But there is one feature missing: Drawing diagrams.

Oliver Sand

react-beautiful-dnd is ugly

July 7, 2022

react-beautiful-dnd is a great package for building complex drag and drop behaviors of lists. If you want to reorder the items in a list or move them between lists, this is the go-to package. But the package has a problem: Atlassian has limited its maintenance to security fixes.

Oliver Sand

I have bad luck with Cypress

May 14, 2022

Testing is all about being confident that your changes to the software can be deployed to production without problems. While unit or integration tests help you to test details — like the results of a calculation, or whether two parts of your system are working together — you don’t know whether all parts of your system are working together as they should. Systems are getting ever more complex and we try to cope with that by splitting it up into parts so that we can handle them or distribute the complexity over multiple teams. Teams develop and deploy small, loosely coupled Microservices that reassemble a bigger system. How do you know that everything works together and that a user can use it? This is where End-to-end (e2e) testing comes into play. And Cypress can be a nice tool for that.

Oliver Sand

Draw a pattern along a path using SVG

April 2, 2022

Recently I wanted to create the effect of a cable for an application I’m working on. The cable should have a textile look, similar to a rope, which is quite common right now (for example the charging cable of the current MacBook Pro). I’m using SVG for rendering, so applying a pattern to a stroke path should be easy, right?

Oliver Sand

prometheus_client, a Prometheus Implementation for Dart

March 4, 2022

We recently released the stable 1.0.0 release of our prometheus_client package — a way to expose Prometheus metrics in your Dart application. It’s inspired by similar packages like the official client_java for Java or the community package prom_client for Node.js. We have several Microservices written in Dart where we use the package to provide observability. I want to share the experience we had while developing the package.

Oliver Sand

Choosing dependencies – Snyk Advisor

February 1, 2022

I recently wrote about my indicators that I use while choosing dependencies in the NPM ecosystem. After writing the post I thought, can you automate these steps to provide a quick view on package health? One tool that does that is the Snyk Advisor. I tried the advisor and want to summarize my experience.

Oliver Sand