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About

I'm Jean-Luc Makiola, a software developer in Brandenburg an der Havel, Germany. I build apps for Android, iOS and the web, connect systems to each other, and help companies move their data out of US clouds.

What I've built myself

Calendula is a calendar for Android, open source under the MIT licence and available on Google Play and F-Droid. It doesn't need the internet permission, because it sits on top of the calendar storage Android already has instead of running its own sync. Volunteers translate it into fifteen languages. Agendula, a task app, takes the same approach and syncs over plain CalDAV.

Neither is client work, but you can read the source and judge it for yourself before you hire anyone. Everything else is under Work.

Background

  1. Start

    Dual study programme in computer science at Deutsche Telekom

    Terms at university alternating with work at a large corporation, on systems to match. How planning, coordination and sign-off work there is hard to learn from books.

  2. Switch

    Business informatics

    The programme fits better with what I want to work on: software and the business side behind it. That ended the dual arrangement; the degree continues.

  3. Today

    Software developer at CodeGuides GmbH

    A small company, and in a small company responsibility isn't spread across departments: I design architectures, run projects and write the code myself. On top of that I review other people's systems and assess them in writing, and work on AI projects.

Both are employment, not clients of my own business. The projects there belong to those employers and their customers, and I don't show them here. What I bring from them is the experience: how projects are estimated, where they fail, and what someone else's code looks like when you are asked to take it over.

How I work

I'd rather build on open standards and on what a system already provides than add a layer of my own that someone has to maintain for years. What was never built cannot break.

I run the infrastructure behind this site and my apps myself, on a server in Finland rented from a German provider: version control, translations, analytics and releases. What I recommend on digital sovereignty, I use myself.

The business

My business is a sole proprietorship based in Brandenburg an der Havel, registered since 2024. I work with clients in Germany and abroad, remotely where it makes sense, in English or German. The full legal details are in the Impressum (German).

Questions about a project?

Tell me what it's about. You'll hear back within two working days, and if I'm the wrong person for the job, I'll say so.

Get in touch