I’ve just read through the text again and realised that it isn’t that easy at all to phrase things positively, to keep a kindly tongue so as to reach people’s hearts. But perhaps I may still be permitted to voice this criticism. That’s how I experienced it, and I’m happy to reflect even more deeply now and think about what I can change in future so that, above all, I’ll be having positive experiences. It’s a learning process that I’m happy to embrace and that I’m looking forward to.
Monday is the 9th of November – for me an anniversary I’ll never forget, because on 9 November 1989, as a member of the GDR Border Troops, I witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall first-hand. And that’s something that will stay with me until the end of my life as one of the most impressive events and experiences I’ve ever had – because I spent 18 years of my life growing up in the firm conviction that in all likelihood I would never leave the GDR and that I would never have the chance to go to West Berlin.
A few years earlier I had an encounter with Komsomol members – young men and women – from Irkutsk, because my father, a Russian teacher, worked during the holidays mainly as a gid-perevodchik (guide/interpreter) for Jugendtourist. Jugendtourist was the GDR’s youth travel organisation, and it had a contract with Intourist, the Soviet organisation. And in the summer months so-called friendship trains regularly arrived, carrying young people from the Soviet Union who were holidaying in the GDR and enjoying privileges. And back then my father got me a job and said: “Hey, son, your Russian is good, you get on well with young people – do this job as a gid-perevodchik!”
And my first group – I’ll never forget it – of Komsomol members, from Irkutsk, as I said, arrives in Berlin. We had our own coach with our own driver, we always took our meals in the best hotels, it was top-notch. And we do the city tour of Berlin in our own coach, and I tell the group of young Komsomol members, in Russian, all about the sights, about the history of my capital. And we pull up at the Brandenburg Gate, where there was a scheduled stop. And the group gets out, and I explain that on the other side you can see West Berlin and that this is where the state border runs, and I explain the historical background.
And I remember it as if it were today: the boss of this lot – he wasn’t very tall, always had a very, very serious look, never smiled – stared at me, stony-faced, and said to me in Russian: “So, Torsten, we want you to take us over there.” And at first I didn’t quite understand what they meant by “over there”. Then I asked, and he says: “Well, we want to walk through the Brandenburg Gate over to West Berlin.” I thought: here comes the punchline, here comes the joke, here comes the fun! And when it didn’t come, I realised he was serious. And then I made the attempt to explain to him that this was the state border of the GDR and that over there was the enemy – that’s West Berlin. And by now we were surrounded by more members of the group, and there was already unrest, because more and more of them were saying: “We want to go over there now!” And I, almost helpless, explained that it was completely impossible, that in the worst case I’d be shot. And the boss didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let the group go to West Berlin. And only after a few minutes did a few from the group come to my rescue and say: “Yes, of course we won the war” – because that was the boss’s argument: “But we won, we’re the victors! Why aren’t we allowed over there? What’s all this? Why are you blocking our way?” And then a few came and said: “Well, sure we won, but Berlin was divided, and this here is the former Soviet sector, that’s now East Berlin, the capital of the GDR, and the rest, the bigger part, is West Berlin, and it’s autonomous and self-governing, but you can’t get there from here.”
So that was a defining experience for me. And then, three or four years later, I was drafted as a border soldier – more or less as punishment for no longer being willing to become an officer after all. For a long time I’d been a so-called career-officer applicant, I had signed up – for 25 years of service, I think – but then at the last moment I realised that it wasn’t what I really wanted after all. And that’s why they transferred me to the Border Troops as a punishment. As a punishment because it was known that a high proportion of the Border Troops were Stasi members, and that if you did anything wrong on border duty, you went straight to the political prison in Schwedt.
And then something happened that nobody could have imagined: even Helmut Kohl, the Chancellor at the time, or Ronald Reagan, the American president, or Gorbachev too – none of these powerful men would ever have thought that on 9 November ’89 the Wall would fall and Berlin would no longer be divided. And a song by the Gropiuslerchen comes to mind: “Berlin, dein Herz kennt keine Mauern. Berlin, Berlin, es gibt nichts zu bedauern bei einem Rendezvous…” (“Berlin, your heart knows no walls. Berlin, Berlin, there’s nothing to regret at a rendezvous…”) It was overwhelming.
And now I’ll draw the line to the last two or three days: because three days ago, too, something happened that I’d never have dreamed of. Namely, that I’m now able to build relatively functional, or rather relatively complex, websites myself – and I’m not even talking in the plural, because uno.team is all I need. And that, too, is something I’d never have dreamed of after all the years in which I had to keep reaching out to developers, to people who could code. They were almost exclusively men, and I was dependent on them again and again, and so I very often had to put up with that male ego-dominance thinking.
At the start, when I was more or less working with Matthias Hanns, I was of course dependent on him, and he made me feel it clearly that I – if you like – couldn’t really do anything. And our collaboration did end very quickly. And then Vyacheslav Gromov from St Petersburg, from Leningrad, got to know me, and we started working together. That was much more on an equal footing. All in all, it was a positive experience with Vyacheslav Gromov: I never had the feeling that he was looking down on me – it was a friendly relationship. But we did have technical hurdles to clear: back when we started – still in 2003 – it was very hard to host a site, because the cloud as such wasn’t established yet. So there were only managed servers and shared servers. And since our website didn’t make any money at first, we had to keep costs down, so we mostly booked the cheapest package. And that meant that when the website got more popular and we got more traffic, we had to move. In other words, the website had to be migrated, and that move took two or three weeks, and the website was often unreachable for days. And we went through these moves several times.
We also had to keep changing hosts: at first we had a cheaper one, then we switched to Hetzner. Then at some point Matthias Hanns came back on board and said: “Hey, you need a virtual server, I’ll set it up for you, you need your own server, buy one!” And we did buy one, for 5,000 euros from Thomas-Krenn – that was the name of the company. Matthias gave me the specs, the data, then I first set the server up in his office, he did the initial configuration, then the server stood in our office. And then we found a colocation provider in Hanover, an American company, and back then it was, I think, the only one offering colocation to us. In other words, Matthias set up the server as a virtual server, and we then put it online and used this American company’s backbone, and from then until the sale we hosted our site on our own server.
And when I then started afresh and wanted to have the website rebuilt, my first stop was KnubiSoft from Ukraine. And of course I first had to solve the server problem, had to find a suitable option. I had done my research back then and had come across Google Cloud, because Google was already offering cloud services at the time. And I thought it made sense to have the website rebuilt in Python now, because I’d researched that too and found out that Python was probably the programming language of the future. And KnubiSoft then tried to set up the server in Google Cloud and build the first version, but in the end it didn’t work, for all sorts of reasons – and for starters I’d sunk about 6,000 euros.
I then had to find a new team: I even think that before Paweł I had hired another Ukrainian company, which built the first version of english.best in Python. And when something didn’t work there either – as so often in these collaborations – I ended up with a one-man business, with Paweł from Poland, whom I found on Upwork, just as I had KnubiSoft before. And the first thing Paweł said was: “First I’ll do an audit and take a look at the code.” And of course that costs a bit of money – 200, 300 euros for the audit – which I paid. And afterwards he said (we always communicated in English): “Well, I’m not overly impressed, but you can work with it – I can clean up the code and then we can get started.” And of course he billed his time for cleaning up the code, that’s only logical. In other words, I’d already put about 500, 600, 700 euros on the table before building the website had even started.
And then Paweł built the website and eventually reached his limits too, and I had to look for the next provider again. And I think that was Light IT – Denis and Light IT. They suggested the same thing: that they’d do an audit first. The audit cost money, and then they said: “Well, we have to rebuild this from the ground up – from scratch. We can’t do anything with this code, it’s such a mess, there are so many bugs in it, we have to start over.” Which meant I had to search all over again and then landed at SoftVoyage (or rather the Belarusian team), which then built the version of english.best over several months.
And of course it’s clear that code always contains bugs and that it always has to be maintained, modernised, debugged – so that a website, once it’s live, is never finished. It’s never finished, it always needs care. And that always meant dependence on remote teams. Because German teams weren’t an option, for all sorts of reasons: the first reason was that back then – probably just like today – there were hardly any German developers, and the ones there were still worked mostly in PHP. By now there may be a few Python people, but back then there really weren’t any. In other words, I’d have loved to work with a local team here in Leipzig, but it was impossible!
So, that means: now I’ve solved several problems. Firstly, the server problem, because I now use Cloudflare Pages – super fast and free! And the next problem is, of course, developing the website itself: I no longer have that bottleneck and that huge effort and friction of the Scrum system. Scrum is history for me now! So I no longer have to communicate with a remote team, which was laborious and difficult and in the end always led to big misunderstandings. And the code is constantly maintained and improved by the AI too, bugs get fixed, bugs get cleaned up – and I see the result immediately.
That means this topic of momentum we’ve already talked about, combined with flow: I have flow and momentum, and that keeps generating new ideas. And now I can map several projects within uno.team onto the website and develop them further more or less in parallel. And the best thing about it: this setup I have now is only the beginning – it’s going to get even better! I think I’ve said that before, too – I’m happy to repeat myself.
And for me that is leapfrogging at its best – it really is “overtaking without catching up”! I don’t have to make up for years of programming knowledge, which would be impossible for me at my age. And that opens up a whole new window of time for me, because I can focus on web development once more for the next four, five, six years. That was something I had actually almost said goodbye to, because I simply no longer had the resources – the mental resources, because I constantly have to search, constantly communicate, constantly wait for feedback, constantly chase things up – and of course the financial resources. Now I pay a fraction of what I was still transferring to the remote developer teams just four or five years ago. So: happy days – humanity at its best!
Who would you like to talk to about this thought?
Thank you. Every answer fits – take it with you into your day. Would you like to share something yourself?
