Profile
I'm Earl-Geoffrey Fisch, Jeff to most people. At the end of 2021 I opened an app about programming out of curiosity. By 2024 I had a vocational qualification. In between there were a great many late evenings.
Background
until 2021
Retail, customer service, merchandising, sales, courier work — and yes, hairdressing too. Not a straight career path. But one in which I watched a great many people work with tools that nobody had consulted them about.
autumn 2021
Free, colourful, meant for an idle evening: my first contact with code. After the first evening, the evening was gone. So was the night. What started as a pastime turned within a few weeks into a rather uncomfortable question: why am I not doing this for a living?
2022
Rather than keep tinkering on the side, I made what is probably the biggest decision of my working life: retraining as an IT specialist for application development. With a family, two children, and full awareness that this would be no weekend project.
2022 – 2024
Daytimes were the programme itself: C# and .NET, databases and SQL, web fundamentals, software design, project work. Evenings and weekends were voluntary extras — online courses, small programs of my own, my first repository, and the first version of this very website. More than 35 course certificates accumulated along the way.
2024
Finished. The career changer with the night shifts became a developer with a job title — and for the first time, the feeling of having landed in the right field.
since 2024 · today
Since then I do professionally exactly what grabbed me back then: I make custom software solutions possible and then build them for our clients — applications, interfaces, automation. From the first unclear question through the design and into day-to-day operation. And I keep learning, because in this profession that isn't a bonus, it's the baseline.
Changing careers
“Late starter” sounds like a disadvantage. In practice it's the opposite — for three fairly concrete reasons.
Spend years behind a counter, on the phone and out on the road, and you quickly recognise what somebody actually means — even when the sentence sounds technically impossible. Translating requirements isn't a side activity, it's the main work.
I have been the person who had to work with a badly designed screen because it happened to be there. You don't forget that feeling — it's the best possible motivation to do better.
A difficult customer conversation takes time. A bug that only appears on Thursdays takes time too. Both are considerably easier to endure once you've endured something similar before.
Away from the screen
Married, two children, two cats with firm opinions about their human's screen time. German, living in Germany.
When I'm not working I read science fiction, play strategy and city-building games, repair electronics that were technically already bin-bound — and build mechanical keyboards. Designing, soldering, adapting firmware, changing the key mapping three times over. There is hardly a better hobby for someone who types all day for a living.
The common thread is always the same: take something apart, understand it, and put it back together better. That applies to keyboards exactly as it applies to business processes.
The more interesting question is what you're currently stuck on. Tell me — or have a look first at what I work with.