Welcome to my blog — a behind-the-scenes journey into the development of both hardware and software for a modern pedal board.

About me (past)

Hi, I’m Jens — a software developer with over 30 years of hands-on experience across industries like finance, transportation, healthcare, high-performance trading, and ecommerce. My journey started in the 1980s with a Commodore PET 2001, followed by an Apple IIe — and it was love at first byte. Since then, software (and often hardware) has been more than just a job. It’s been my passion and playground.

1990 I began with DBase and Clipper, and nearly had my macro-based menu system published in the Nantucket Magazine (before the company disappeared — sigh). Back then, we were building data warehouses on 80×45 character terminals, linking two machines with Token Ring networks, and wrestling daily with matrix printers.

In 1997, I worked on digitizing the Frankfurt Book Fair, building a cross-platform UI for Mac and PC long before Java was viable for real production. That led to my first encounter with cross-compiled C++, XVT/XVTDSC, and using a compact, blazing-fast read-only database build by my college — years before Elasticsearch existed.

1999 At Deutsche Bahn, I helped tackle the wildly complex problem of optimal group seating on trains.

• with EJBs on a quad core server! And VisualAge, a tool ahead of it’s time until IBM screwed it.

Then came the-object-company, where we developed autonomous warrant trading systems for Dresdner Bank in 2001, with blinking real-time Swing UIs on top of JMS, BEA WebLogic, and EJBs (yes, those EJBs).

• we created connection to ORC, EURONEXT, XETRA/TradeLink
• used all the Java “O"s: OOA, OOD, OOP
• Fought Nightmares like SimpleDateFormat not being thread-safe
• Server and Clientside development

In 2003, I joined one of the largest projects of my career — building multi-channel banking architectures for Postbank spanning internal UIs, call-center tools, public websites, and huge middleware systems for credit cards, loans, and external credit checks (Schufa, InFoScore - sigh). Overall we build hugh service layers to combine shadow databases and SAP and introduced configurable process engines all in

• JAVA, EJBs
• some Cobol, BTX
• SAP R3 (Banking) … and UML

2006 I started building a custom Swing-based SQL editor for Depfa Bank’s Summit platform, automating UI generation from hundreds of database tables to display and edit 1:1, 1:n, n:m relations properly.

• JAVA, Swing, JMS, WebStart(!), JBoss
• Summit

Mid of 2007 I left the finance area and jumped into the startup scene, working with old friends (and new time zones) from New Zealand and the Australian outback, long before “remote-first” was a buzzword. Time drift was horrible, but I loved it and got in touch with people I closely worked together over years, remote while they travelled through the outback of Australia, laptop on their knees. That was considerably “hard core remote”. We jumped on the first stable libraries and frameworks like:

• Maven
• Tapestry5
• Spring
• Hibernate, PostgresSql
• iReport

In parallel around 2008, the shopping clubs sprout like mushrooms from the ground, so did Brands4Friends. Due to the nature of their marketing, campaign driven model, their servers in canada crashed regularly when they sold some Gucci Article at 50% discount. At that time the first version of an high-performance Terracotta driven shop
cluster was up and running after 3 month, written by 3 developers, no more overselling, no more crashed. I was responsible for the entire architecture / development of the shop and later integration in the inventory management and payment system.

• Wirecard (sigh) for creditcard handling, staged 3d-secure
• Microsoft Navision Backend.
• Connections to AWS S3 / EC2
• c#/.net Bridge to Navision
• Terracotta, JMS-via-Terracotta
• Maven, Tapestry 5, Spring, Hibernate, HSQL, MySQL
• Testframework, Quartz, JMeter, Hyperic, Rest API
• No judgment, but using high-resolution images of Miss Switzerland in Victoria’s Secret apparel as our test data may have been our most… motivating QA decision ever. Needless to say, that release was tested more thoroughly than any before it.

We built platforms for:

• fashion-and-you (Suisse)
• brands4friends (Germany)
• Sukar (Dubai)
• clickon (Brazil)
• grupfoni (Turkey)
• India
• Japan, Australia, Mexico

I also had the great opportunity to work side-by-side with teammates in Switzerland, India, and Brazil — not just remotely, but on-site in their offices. Those face-to-face collaborations were deeply rewarding and gave me invaluable insights into local work cultures, team dynamics, and what truly makes a global project tick.

Unfortunately, the nature of Jouney’s is they end. Hard. Which brought me back into the financial field.

Around 2011, I re-entered finance with Deutsche Bank, working on massive credit risk systems — the kind that needed 100+ physical servers back then, which you’d spin up on EKS today. Tools like Hazelcast and MongoDB entered the mix (honestly, which I don’t love, but know them well enough, though).

And in 2014 it started like it began. In 2014, I joined gd-inside, a small, focused team providing regulatory and backend services to financial institutions from Valuation Prices, Arrival Prices or Transaction Cost calculation. Till today. And now I love to work in fields like

• Apache Camel, JavaScript ChartLibs, JDBC driver based on JSONs, Trick JasperReports, Postgres in Kiosk Mode, MongoDb Audit-trails with Playback and so much more…
• Java, Python, Dart, C++
• Docker, Docker, Docker and RestAPIs in R, Python, Java, C++ (don’t ask).
• AI Tools e.g. AWS Textract, AWS NovaLite, ChatGPT API, ChatGPT Agents, Prompts
• Six Financial, WM, FactSet, TTM0, AVS, Bloomberg
• Prometheus, Victoria Metrics, PushGateway, Jmx-Batch-Push, Grafana

About me (present)

Over time, my development focus naturally evolved. Today, I work heavily with Docker, advocate for microservice architectures to generate PDFs and various types of charts, and experiment with AI workflows — from building pipelines for reproducible results to wrestling with ChatGPT agents that answer provider data queries in plain language. It’s a blend of engineering discipline and creative chaos, and I love both.

Outside of my day job, I’m building a DIY MIDI Music Workstation Pedal board — a modular, touchscreen-powered music controller. It’s a return to embedded systems, electronics, and low-level programming mixed with Flutter, C++, Dart, WebSockets, RestAPIs, Docker, and modern component based software architecture. A passion project fueled by curiosity, solder smoke, and my AI pair programmer: ChatGPT.

Music!

Even I am on stage you’ll never spot me. I’m that long-haired, old, slightly scruffy guy hiding in the back. The good news? My Kronos is exactly the right height to perfectly hide my belly. Total win. For all of us.

Or you spot me outside!

§ 5 TMG

Deutsch

Impressum

Angaben gemäß § 5 TMG:

Jens Breitenstein
Am Beracker 12
63691 Ranstadt
Deutschland / Hessen

Kontakt:
E-Mail: jens@diy-pedalboard.de
Telefon: +49 123 4567890

Verantwortlich für den Inhalt nach § 18 Abs. 2 MStV:
Jens Breitenstein (Anschrift wie oben)

Quelle: erstellt mit Hilfe von ChatGPT

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2. Verantwortlicher

Jens Breitenstein
siehe oben

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Stand: Juli 2025

English

Legal Notice

Information according to § 5 TMG (German Telemedia Act):

Jens Breitenstein
Am Beracker 12
63691 Ranstadt
Germany / Hessen

Contact:
E-Mail: jens@diy-pedalboard.de

Responsible for content according to § 18 Abs. 2 MStV (German State Media Treaty):
Jens Breitenstein (same address as above)

This is a purely private, non-commercial blog project.
All content is published without any intention of profit.

Source: Created with assistance from ChatGPT (OpenAI)

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2 Data Controller

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Last updated: July 2025