About

I grew up in my father’s sawmill in southern Germany. Watching machines being built, maintained, and improved left a mark that never really went away.

In 1988 I got my first computer - an Olivetti M10. Four years later I connected my first fischertechnik kit to a PC and started coding. I bought Visual Basic 1.0 with pocket money just to get the manual, because there was no internet to look things up. That’s how I learned - by building things, breaking them, and figuring out why.

In 1997 I won Jugend forscht in Baden-Württemberg with a fischertechnik machine that automatically produced cigarettes. It started as a bet with friends who said it couldn’t be done.

That instinct - prove it works, then figure out how to scale it - has followed me into every professional role since. At Storebrand I coded the MVP that convinced management to fund Norway’s first pension savings app, then built the team that took it to 100,000 installs. At nexiles I co-founded a company helping industrial firms like Siemens Energy and Rolls-Royce move from one-off engineering to platform thinking. At Oda I’ve been building the systems - people, processes, tools - that make logistics at scale actually work.

The domain always changes. The approach doesn’t.

Outside of work I still build things. My current fischertechnik sawmill runs on a Raspberry Pi with 10+ actuators and sensors, controlled via a FastAPI backend and React UI. I self-host my own cloud at home - Docker, Nextcloud, Forgejo, and co - because I like understanding the stack I depend on.

I live in Norway with my wife and daughter. I run, bake sourdough, and occasionally disappear into genealogy records trying to trace where the Schillings came from.