Railslove is a passionate team of hackers and thinkers.

We're all about programming challenges and the beauty of good code. Our backgrounds cover a wide range of development, design and social disciplines. Feel free to drop us a line if you're interested in working with us.

  • Georg

    George knows Railslove since our early days when we shared our first office. After his career as a mechanic he started to enhance web-software engines and made things like freakyphones.de. He then got fed up with running his businesses with crappy software and built SalesKing. George is one of our ruby teachers but can also be booked for mechanic & moped lessons.

  • Jakob

    Jakob is the interface guy, who enjoys closely examining everything that happens between the user and the web app. Be it conceptual interface & interaction design, practical frontend web development, or analysis of ways to improve conversion and user experience. He earned a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from the University of Michigan (USA) in 2009 and has been very involved in all things web, open source and usability ever since starting to work at a local village internet agency in 2001.

  • Jan

    Web developer and graduate student from Cologne, Germany. Computer freak since 1982, in love with web technologies since 2002. His studies in Media and Computer Science at Cologne University of Applied Sciences broadened his mind and set his view on managing projects and applying digital media in the real world. He's always on the road with his cell phone using it 24 hours a day. In private, he's an ambitious artist, winter sports fan, a happy Mac user and loves to enjoy sunshine at the river Rhine. Read more about Jan on his private homepage.

  • Josh

    Josh is a little bit of everything: born and raised in New Zealand, with Romanian, Greek and Welsh heritage, and currently living in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. With experience programming in VB/ASP, Java, and Ruby on Rails, he is like a melting pot of goodness! Josh is a top 30 Rails contributor and helps maintain many popular libraries like multi_json, the linkedin gem, and faraday_middleware. He is also one of the core members behind Travis CI, a distributed continuous integration system for the open source community. When not confined to to desk he likes to drink fantastic flat white coffees from some of the best Amsterdam cafés, and bike to his heart's content.

  • Lars

    Lars fell in love with web development round about the year 2000. His journey took him from Perl over PHP to finally Ruby and Rails in 2005. He's famous for his addiction to payment gateways, database stuff and servers. In private Lars shares an extraordinary interest for climbing and cooking. Last but not least he also has an academic background as Master of Science with focus on Semantic Web Technologies.

  • Lena

    Having been a media activist for many years, Lena is familiar with all kinds of web technologies, most notably Ruby. After an expedition to the world of JavaScript and CouchDB she is now back in Railsland, working on various projects for Railslove. Her main role here is to kick other developers hard when they don't write proper automated tests.

  • Manuel

    Manuel loves solving problems with programming and tries to let even complex solutions look beautifully simple at the surface.

  • Michael

    Michael started web development in 1998. On a long journey from Perl to PHP, passing by Java, he finally found Ruby in early 2005. He's been in love with Ruby and Rails ever since, has built one of the first and biggest German Ruby on Rails applications and calls github his second home.

  • Mike

    From one-liners to big applications, whether it comes to Ruby, PHP or JavaScript, there is not much Mike has not learnt over past 6 years. Doing mostly backend, he is capable of creating a system that does the most complicated stuff, while retaining its simple usage. Personally, he is an HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript freak. Mike was involved in multiple open-source projects, including MediaWiki (wiki engine powering Wikipedia).

    Privately, a brony, an addicted gamer, karaoke singer and a pub crawler who loves cities of Cologne and Wrocław.

  • Paul

    Although Paul fell in love with programming at an early age, he set out on the quest to untangle the ultimate code - NL (natural language) - in the forms of literature and philosophy. He's highly versed in deconstructing anything from Shakespeare to Heidegger. Nevertheless, Paul always maintained a strong interest in web technology and mathematics. We're excited he has now decided to make Rails his fulltime project and to head our Ruby poetry department.

  • Philipp

    Frontend Fiend and Javascript Jockey

  • Ralph

    Ralph has been a web developer since he hacked up a script to connect his Amiga computer to the internet with his parents' modem. Over the years, he has created websites and web applications in PHP, Java/J2EE and Ruby on Rails. He is an active contributor to the Hamburg Ruby scene and an organizer of the local Rails Usergroup. While he is not sitting in front of a computer, he enjoys playing with analog cameras or having a good coffee in a beautiful café.

  • Sebastian

    Sebastian has been using various languages and technologies in his over 10 years of doing professional web development, but some years ago he found indispensable companions in both Ruby and Rails. Having started out as a frontend developer he's also experimenting a lot with HTML5, new JS APIs, CSS3, webOS, and the likes. As a digital nomad Sebastian is constantly traveling around Europe and sometimes the rest of the world--meeting people, soaking up inspiration and trying to decipher the strange ways of humanity.

  • Stephan

    Stephan has been in love with the web since 2000, when he took his first steps with Flash to spice up websites with some serious interactivity. His study in media technology (Medieninformatik) did not only earn him a Master of Science, but also introduced him to the lovely world of Ruby on Rails. He loves to challenge common interaction solutions and to optimise them if need be. Besides that, he is into all kinds of sports like football, tennis, climbing and running.

  • Tatjana

    As Office Manager and Resource Manager Tatjana is in charge of tasks like our payroll, paying vendors, preparing reports on Accounts Receivables, Expenses and some higher-level profitability calculations. Tatjana has a university degree in Modern Chinese Studies along with Business Administration from the University of Cologne, which might explain her marked preference for chinese food and traveling to Asia. Tatjana loves building furniture and enjoys strolling around in the city looking for new street art in her spare time.

  • Tim

    With a reliable sense of <style> and an extensive practice of interaction design Tim gets in on most of our frontends. #haml lover, Sass addict, scribbling, whining, thinking, typing. Besides Michael and Jan, he's one of the founders of Railslove.

Michael Bumann
+49 176 22 74 78 93