Phil's Personal Page

Howdy!
Welcome to my personal Website!

I'm Philipp, and I'm a software and systems engineer living in Berlin.

I'm currently Head of Engineering at cap-on.
While I really enjoy working in this position, I'll often find time for interesting side projects.
I also do freelance work. For my work experience and a selection of past projects head over to work

For inquiries of any kind or my special crèpe recipe you can reach me at moin@philippratz.com

Thanks for stopping by and have a lovely day!

Work Experience

I have over 7 years of experience in IT working on a variety of software projects in various roles. They include building RESTful Services, Data Pipelines, ML-Models, Frontend Components or full multi-layered systems running in Kubernetes including CI/CD processes.
My role in these projects span from hands-on development to designing, planning, and stringing it all together with DevOps tools.
I also have work experience on the management side of IT. As Head of Engineering at cap-on I'm responsible for the engineering team and budget. My focus there is on building customer value while ensuring reliability, performance, security as well as governance guidelines, such as ISO 27001.

Selection of Past Projects

cap-on Core System - Architecture & Engineering Lead

I successfully lead the development of the cap-on Core System which is now at the heart of cap-on’s business model. It’s a cloud-based, orchestrated stack of multiple highly available services. It includes services for IoT data management and analysis, an Asset-as-a-Service pricing engine as well as an asset, contract, and invoice management tool.
Me and my team are actively developing this stack to ensure it can keep up with cap-on's growing needs.
- AWS, K8s/Docker, Python, FastAPI, HA-Postgres/Timescale, Gitlab CI/CD, Ansible

TILMAN (Timescale Log Management Tool) - Architecture Lead and Developer

This started as a personal project of mine but is now the main production logging system at cap-on handling millions of logs.
For most cases, I would recommend to use existing systems such as rsyslog, Greylog or Elastic/Logstash but we had some custom requirements and needed full control over our log system. We also had some very good experiences with Timescale DB, especially insert performance and compression while allowing JSONB fields. The comprised of a Log service, a Timescale Database, and a sidecar container reading and sending the logs to the DB from anywhere. The code for the ladder is open-source and can be found here.
- Docker, Linux Pipes, Python, FastAPI, Postgres/Timescale, Gitlab CI/CD

SOFIE ML-Model & Pipeline - Researcher & ML-Engineer

SOFIE was a joint research project between TU-Berlin and Trustami of which my Master's Thesis was a vital part. The project's aim was to build an ML model using NLP features to identify German fake online reviews. Ground truths in this project came from mining Telegram and Whatsapp groups that incentivised fraudulent reviews. After finishing the academic part I built a job-based data pipeline for data harvesting and model building as well as a service with an API for inference.
- Hetzner, Python, FastAPI, Tensorflow, Airflow, MongoDB

This website

I built this site without using any frameworks except jQuery. Normally, I think it makes sense to be pragmatic and output-oriented, which often means to build on the work of others and not reinvent the wheel. However, sometimes I enjoy making things from scratch as it helps to understand all that's happening. Code is here.
- HTML, CSS, JavaScript

Photos & Graphics by Unsplash/martenbjork, cap-on, Timescale, Trustami, Personal from top to bottom

About me

I enjoy managing or accompanying singular software projects but am also interested in how corporate IT systems can be set up and managed efficiently.

Some of the technologies that I like working with are Docker/Kubernetes, Linux, Python (+FastAPI), Go, NodeJS, React, AWS and Postgres (+Timescale). I have also worked with Hetzner, Azure, Go, Java, Nim, Typescript, Terraform and various No-Code Tools (Airtable is pretty sweet!).

On the personal side I enjoy the many food options that the German capital has to offer! Always happy to connect with folks interested in IT and even those who aren't!

For more info you can always check out my LinkedIn or my Github.

Legal Info (Impressum)

Philipp Ratz
Gustav-Müller-Str Str. 3, 10829
philippratz.com
moin (at) philippratz.com
P. Ratz IT Consulting

Legal disclaimer

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Fundamentals

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Users of this website may exercise their right to object to the processing of their personal data at any time. If you wish to correct, block, delete or obtain information about the personal data stored about you or have questions regarding the collection, processing or use of your personal data or wish to revoke consents granted, please contact the following email address: moin@philippratz.de.