Michel Smola

08/2021 - present

Software Engineer at farbenmeer GmbH.

farbenmeer is a software agency and consultancy specializing in high-quality custom software solutions. Throughout various projects including both inhouse development and external consulting, farbenmeer provides plenty of opportunities for growth and learning in technical, business and organizational skills. The following are some of the projects I have worked on:

bonprix react java spring AWS GCP

bonprix Handelsgesellschaft mbH is a german online retail company that focuses on owning large parts of its supply chain to make high-quality clothing cost-efficiently and at scale. Throughout multiple consulting gigs, I have worked on various projects across analytics, UI- and technical research, modernization of legacy systems, cloud migration and DevOps practices and procurement and integration of multiple third-party services.

TBF + Partner AG typescript next.js python

TBF + Partner AG is a swiss engineering company that plans and executes some of the largest infrastructure projects in switzerland, germany, italy and other european countries in fields such as energy, transportation and waste management. My responsibilities center around the conception and development of a customized internal software solution to digitalize and automate complex and highly specialized processes in both engineering and sales to institutional clients. TBF puts a strong emphasis on delivering value by improving the productivity of its highly skilled workforce which requires a deep understanding of the people, workflows and processes involved as well as a strong technical understanding to move fast and stay ahead of publicly available solutions.

01/2019 - 01/2025 typescript react php

Technical Co-Founder at LaBoldeVita.

Complete implementation and maintenance of the La Bolde Vita online shop for exotic font faces. Due to its limited scope, it was feasible to implement La Bolde Vita as a true single page react application keeping loading times to a minimum throughout the shopping experience. The backend is an extremely minimalistic custom solution based on the Slim-Framework in PHP and a MySQL database with payments using PayPal.

By keeping the technical complexity low, La Bolde Vita was able to run for six years at extremely low hosting and maintenance cost turning a passionate side-project into a small but self-sustaining business.

As legal requirements changed, La Bolde Vita had to adapt its business model and move on to a new platform specialized on type foundries but the experience of owning the entire technical side of the business and finding a profitable niche in building an extremely low maintenance solution was an invaluable experience.

09/2020 - 07/2021 typescript react AWS Angular

Fullstack developer at Qualitypool GmbH.

Qualitypool is a provider of financial services to insurance and loan brokers. In this role, I was part of an agile team within the Holacracy framework working on a web application targeting the brokers within the Qualitypool network with the goal of accelerating their conversion rate by providing targeted information and integrating with external insurance calculation solutions.

Building on AWS-products including Lambda, EC2, Fargate, S3, SQS, DynamoDB, CDK / CloudFormation, AppSync, CloudFront and all the various networking components, the time at Qualitypool provided a chance for a deep dive into cloud-native application architecture and microservices.

On the frontend, I worked on several new features in a unified, react-based customer portal while also maintaining and transitioning a legacy Angular-based application.

09/2018 - 07/2020 javascript react sass frontend

Student job as frontend developer at excentos Software GmbH.

At excentos I've worked with an experienced team of developers on a medium-sized react-codebase. I had the opportunity to dive deep into the details of the react-library and surrounding ecosystem, e.g. webpack, redux, redux-saga as well as sass. for layout.

My responsibilities included, besides application of design specifications and feature development, the management and optimization of the codebase. I had the chance to make structural decisions on my own to a great extent and play a great role in shaping the core of the frontend.

08/2017 - 05/2018 c++ python qt application

Student job as application developer at Beamfox Technologies.

Beamfox Technologies develops specialized desktop software for Nanolithography, a procedure used in chip production. My responsibilities here included the development of a python-API for the core written in c++ as well as general UI-development using Qt/QML.

At Beamfox I had the chance to collect experience in a customer-oriented desktop project in C++ and get to know development in a team in an early-phase startup.

06/2015 - 05/2016 admin bash osx linux windows

Student job as IT Specialist at IBM.

At IBM I experienced working at a large company with steep hierarchies as well as knowledge in general corporate IT including management of customer desktops as well as servers using all three large operating systems and common technologies such as active directory.

05/2014 - 05/2015 admin bash osx linux windows

Student job as IT Specialist at Geometry Global.

Besides technical expertise Geometry Global gave me insight into the ad industry as well as working in a small dedicated team.

Job reference

08/2010 - 01/2017 php javascript jquery

Freelance project work for Kreisservice.

For Kreisservice I have been developing websites and shops for small to medium-sized companies in the Rhein-Main-Area. Starting 2010 I have worked through the development of the web technologies we know today, starting with pure PHP/HTML based websites with simple javascript-snippets to enhance interactivity and jQuery to the javascript-ecosystem we know today with npm and extensive libraries/frameworks such as Next.js.

04/2018 - 07/2020 c++ python data science

For my master of science in physics at Humboldt-University Berlin I specialized in elementary particle and computer based physics.

In 2017 I enrolled for a term abroad at University of Copenhagen.

My master thesis is an analysis of data recorded with the ATLAS detector named "Dedicated Studies with the ATLAS detector for the full LHC run-2 analysis to search for single production of vector-like \(T\) or \(Y\) quarks decaying to a \(W b\) final state". Writing it helped me gain lots of experience with scientific methods and the large-scale software project AnalysisTop (C++), which is the analysis framework used at ATLAS.

2025 node.js REST open source

Lately, I've been a bit frustrated with the lack of a great tool for managing client-server boundaries in react applications. Tapi takes a similar approach to Elysia by providing a simple way to define a clean REST-API and access it from the client in a type-safe manner using a common type import.

While released under farbenmeer-stewardship, Tapi is currently my personal exploration into what the future of react development might look like.

See the Package on NPM or the GitHub Repository including a collection of related packages such as my mini-react-router or my prototype for a completely new web-framework.

2024 rust open source

Bloom is my 2024 attempt to sketch out my vision of a cross-platform, react-like UI framework. It provides a set of hooks very closely aligned with React's APIs for managing state and components render jsx-like markup but the core library is not tied to html as the rendering target. Instead, the idea is to make it possible to use the same framework to declaratively render Widgets from desktop UI frameworks such as GTK or Qt enabling cross-platform UIs that run at truly native speed with a developer experience that is as close to React as possible.

While rust might not be the future of frontend development for various reasons, this was a great way to learn more about both rust and the fine details of building an immediate mode GUI framework.