At the end of 2017, I decided to finally give up on my master’s degree and try to find a job. I think in my heart, I’ve known for a while that I wasn’t going to finish that degree. There weren’t many classes that interested me, and after taking about a year to finish my bachelor’s thesis a few years earlier, I dreaded to ever write a master’s thesis.

I sent out a few job applications. One of them was for a frontend development job at VZG1. They welcomed me with open arms. It sounded like they were having trouble finding a developer at all, possibly because in the IT industry, it is usually more attractive to work for a private company than a public institution. For me, it was a great opportunity to finally move on from being a student and earn some money.

I started working on Project coli-conc2 in May 2018. The project had already started a few years earlier and they had a good idea of the web application I was going to build, including a prototype. I had a lot of autonomy though and chose Vue.js as the web framework. As I recall, it didn’t take long until I had my own prototype that we then refined over time. My new baby: The Mapping Tool Cocoda3.

While Cocoda was my main focus for the first year or so, we also built our own backend and other complementary services related to the project. Over time, together with my colleagues Uma and Jakob, we built a whole infrastructure for coli-conc.

As you may know, I’m very fond of Japan, and at that time, I was thinking about getting a working holiday visa and spending a year over there. Originally, I thought I’d quit my job to do that, but what actually happened was that I continued to work at VZG for a small number of hours each week in order to maintain the infrastructure and slowly continue development. I would think that very few employers would let their employees do something like this, so I was extremely grateful (although in retrospect, it would have been a better experience to look for jobs in Japan instead of continuing my job in Germany remotely). That trip to Japan was cut short by the COVID pandemic.

With COVID came more flexibility in the workplace and everyone started working remotely. This transitioned into a hybrid model that was still quite flexible. I spent some time in Norway, working remotely while staying with my friends.

I also reduced my working hours, first to 30 hours, then to 24. My thinking was that I wanted to work in order to live, not live in order to work. Maybe 24 is a little low, but it allowed me to take a lot more vacation than normal (by working ahead) and still have plenty of time in my daily life for friends and hobbies. Of course, it helps that I didn’t have any financial responsibilities and my main expenses were rent and travel (no car, mortgage, family to support, etc.).

All of this, plus the nice and supportive team, made it a great place to work.

I still began thinking about changing jobs. There were definitely times when work wasn’t going so well for me, and I really noticed how being unproductive at work drains your energy, even for the life outside of work. I also realized that even after working there for a few years, I never really developed an interest for knowledge organization systems used in libraries, and I longed for a change. Not that I think that this is a requirement for having a fulfilling job, but it certainly helps.

However, having such a comfortable position made it difficult for me to actually initiate change. I never really applied for other jobs, and it was not until 2024 that I finally started to take action.

First, I applied to the Apple Developer Academy in Naples, Italy. I intended to write a separate post about this, but never got around to it. It was something that I really wanted to get into, but unfortunately, the competition was tough and I didn’t score enough points in the online exams.

At the same time, I had been talking to my friends Johanna and Helmut, who I’ve been visiting a lot in Norway for the past few years, about the possibility of actually moving in with them. Not getting into the Apple Developer Academy made me take this option more seriously, and around July or August of 2024, we had decided that this would happen in 2025!

As I got closer to my last day at work, I realized that I’m actually really proud of what I have accomplished at work over the last six and a half years. It’s not perfect. There are still bugs. Some things that should have been done were never prioritized. The code could be cleaner. But at the end of the day, I have built a whole infrastructure of tools and services that actually work and get used (though not by many, unfortunately). And it’s all open source as well!4

All this to say: Thank you, everyone at VZG, and especially the coli-conc team. I had a great time! But it’s time to move on. On to the next thing!

  1. VZG = Verbundzentrale des GBV (Head Office of the GBV); GBV = Gemeinsamer Bibliotheksverbund (Common Library Network). See https://gbv.de. ↩

  2. https://coli-conc.gbv.de ↩

  3. https://coli-conc.gbv.de/cocoda/ ↩

  4. See https://github.com/search?q=topic:coli-conc+org:gbv&type=Repositories. I’m pretty sure this helped a lot at the interview for my new job in Trondheim, where I brought my laptop and was able to actually show what I had built over the years. ↩