Sven Rüchel
Creative Coder
Creative unconventional thinker with passion for innovation and coding combined with more than 25,000 hours of work experience
I really enjoy programming - having spent many of my childhood years programming away in the basement. Many years later, I still have the same zeal for developing and implementing complex software solutions as I had back then.
I enjoy developing products - designing intuitive and effective user interfaces supported by intelligent workflows – which allow users to efficiently and comfortably perform tasks.
I enjoy helping people - I am delighted by every “thank you” I get after solving a certain problem. At the same time, I also enjoy supporting other software developers as they design and implement their solutions.
There are two hearts beating in my chest – one beats for software development, the other beats for product development. Therefore, the traditional professional title of “Software developer” doesn’t quite cut it. I feel that the concept of »Digital Designer« , developed by the digital association bitcom , comes very close to how I see my role.
Like a fashion designer – designing fashion with pen and paper to subsequently bring creations to life behind the sewing machine – I use pen and paper to design digital products, subsequently implementing them on my computer.
Why Maria & James?
It started with a problem that annoyed me more and more: in recent years, every day when I worked on my PC, I had to grapple with more and more information that reached me in increasingly different ways.
Over the years, traditional email was joined by more and more Web-based tools: project management tools, collaboration tools, bug trackers, IT monitoring and so on. Unfortunately, a lot of these admittedly useful tools feel obliged to terrorise you with innumerable email messages
The choice is generally between plague and cholera: if you don’t allow enough email messages to come in, you risk missing something important; if you allow too many email messages, you risk drowning in the flood of emails and the same thing happens: you miss some important bit of information.
Best are those friendly email messages along the lines of "There’s some new information – take another look at the website.”
It was with increasing frustration that I began to think about how to solve the problem. After some time, I came up with the idea of the personal desktop assistant.
I have a dream
When I finished high school, our graduating class published a graduation newspaper in which all the graduates were asked about their dreams for the future:
In the year 2000 you will be confronted with software developed by me on every street corner.
Life had something different in store for me, but the dream always remained.
When I was 12 years old, my uncle, who was studying electrical engineering at the time, got his first computer – a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Every Sunday, we would drive to my grandparents and I would watch over my uncle’s shoulder while he was programming. After a few weeks, I explained his programming errors to him.
For my 13th birthday, I got my first computer – a Sinclair ZX 81.
A degree in IT was on the cards until by coincidence I came across a copy of the magazine Wirtschaftsinformatik. In retrospect I have to say that was fortunate, because I decided to study business IT which gives me an interdisciplinary background.
After graduating, I worked from 1997 to 1998 as a webmaster at STERN magazine (stern.de). This was followed by two intensive years working as an IT manager for the Internet auction house ricardo.de.
Since the burst of the dotcom bubble, I have spent several years developing telephony communications solutions for the penal system. In addition, in recent years I become involved in various start-up projects.