Nr. 01
Freundebuch
My open-source project: a self-hosted app for tending friendships on purpose. SvelteKit, Hono and TypeScript on open standards like vCard and CardDAV – so the data stays in sync with your phone and stays yours.
A retrospective · Developer ExperienceA retrospective · DevEx
TimSchumacher
Tools, workflows and the people in between.
I am a software engineer working on developer experience – on everything that can get in the way between a good idea and running code. Most of what I know, I learned by clearing that path for others.
- Location
- Odernheim am Glan, Rhineland-Palatinate
- Day job
- Senior Software Engineer at E.ON · DevEx & OSPO Ambassador
- Admission
- Free. Questions are very welcome.
Room I
About me
I work as a Senior Software Engineer at E.ON, where I am a DevEx and OSPO ambassador. Mostly that means I look at where developers get stuck in their day-to-day work and try to smooth those places out a little – with tooling, pipelines, documentation and sometimes simply a good conversation.
I have no silver bullets. What I bring is curiosity, patience while trying things out, and the conviction that good developer experience has less to do with polish than with being dependable.
My goal: share good practices and good tools – at work just as much as in the open-source world.
Room II
Exhibits
A selection of what I am working on right now or worked on recently. None of it came about alone – and much of it is still in progress.
Nr. 02
Calendar and mail over MCP
Two MCP servers of my own: caldav-mcp brings calendars into an Obsidian Tasks workflow, imap-mcp makes your own mailboxes searchable via notmuch – read-only by construction, not by convention.
Nr. 03
MCP in practice
Building, connecting and bundling MCP servers – for instance behind Azure API Management with Entra ID SSO. So that AI tools arrive where the work already happens.
Nr. 04
Connecting knowledge
A knowledge graph as an engineering knowledge foundation – a shared base of knowledge about our systems, for people and tools alike. After comparing the big graph databases, the honest answer was: SQLite with FTS5 and sqlite-vec is entirely enough here.
Nr. 05
Small helpers
Claude Code skills for everyday work: commit-craft for conventional commits and tidy branches, docs-sync for ADRs and a changelog out of the git history.
Room III
Principles
Listen first, then build.
Even the best tool does not help when it solves the wrong problem.
The smallest solution that holds.
Not every question needs a graph database. Sometimes a file is enough.
Open where possible.
Open source, open standards and European data sovereignty matter to me.
Docs are part of it.
A decision nobody can read up on is only half made.
Room IV
Toolbox
TypeScriptNode.jsSvelteKitHonoPostgreSQLGitLabmise-en-placeDockerEmacsArch LinuxSwaySelf-hosted at Hetzner
TypeScript is home. Everything else I pick up when a problem asks for it.
Room V
Notes
Written down irregularly: whenever I have learned something worth sharing. Sometimes long, sometimes just a thought.
Why it ended up being SQLite
I compared ArcadeDB and Neo4j for a knowledge graph – and ended up recommending a file. On the size of problems and the size of their solutions.
Exit · Contact
Let's talk.
I am glad to get questions, pointers and shared ideas around developer experience and open source – including a »we solved that differently«.