Piggytracker

2020 was a nerve wracking year. I took the time to develop a tool for budget management named piggytracker in a household, that I would use together with my wife.

I wrote the backend in Typescript on Express and Nodejs. The frontend exists in variants of Reactjs and AngularJS. The source code is available on github.

I was supported with the infrastructure (devops) and backend architecture by my brother Erik Wegner. Thank you Erik!

H.I.G.G.S.

It is not often, that the projects I work on are public and it is even rarer, that I can publicly say to have been working on them. Already a year earlier work started on this project, where we enabled the Frieda&Fred in Graz, Austria to run an exhibition using 40 Hololenses. In that exhibition users can walk around freely and immerse themselves into an interactive story woven around time and climate change.

This project was a tough call, as an exhibition of such scale and detail has never been done before (on a Hololens).

Travel

Looking back at this year, it is hard to pin point it to a specific topic or achievement other than travel and learning. During this year I worked in Hamburg, Amsterdam, Mainz, Graz, London, Neuzelle, Wien, München and a lot in Berlin 🙂

During this year, I learned a lot about innovation, change management and how various industries handle.

Farming

I wanted to create another side project. I failed. Mainly, because I was not focused on gameplay, but on creating a world and tooling.

On the upside, I released some of the tools, I created along the way publicly for others to use or change.

The tools can be found on github. Here is a short list: Unity Blender Terrain Tools, Unity BHive,

Holography

The Microsoft Hololens opened up possibilities, of which no one knew they were needed. It demonstrated the virtues of digital content right on your finger tip, virtual collaboration and unlimited screen real-estate. It also outweighted the bulkiness of the device. In search for a problem to the solution, together with some colleagues at exozet, we created our vision of integrated remote maintenance.

The photo to the left shows a visit to the Microsoft office in Munich, which we visited for demo purposes.

On the family front: We experienced heavy disruption by our first born 🙂

Wedding

I was working for numerous clients ranging from extremely timely trade show solutions (IAA) to long-term SDK architecture (multiplatform) and code base porting (seven year old code base). I cannot name the clients for obvious reasons, but the learning experience was awesome and the reward was to deliver excellent work to the clients, which made them happy!

There were lots of events I visited and took part in. Respawn Gathering of Game Developers 2015 was among the most interesting, where Linda Stein and I gave a talk on how to survive in a digital agency.

This was also the year, I married my wife – so we had a wedding. I was working for various clients – so dancing on multiple weddings. Last but not least: I was living in Berlin, Wedding.

Developers

As a Development Supervisor my main focus was to establish a strong force of Unity Developers at Exozet (now Endava). There were more than 20 Unity developers working on numerous projects and at the end of the year, the teams were working like a well oiled machine.

The Vintage Computing Festival in Berlin should also be mentioned here. Writing, compiling and running code on a PDP -I think- 11 is a very special thing to experience.

In the very last days of 2014 something very magical happened. I hooked up with my future wife 🙂

Marbelous!

In 2013 I spent 2 Months worth of every bit of time after work in developing Marbelous! A puzzle jump-n-run for iOS, Android and Ouya developed in Unity. It featured 35 levels in 6 episodes with a retro game inspired final level for each episode.

Marbelous! received decent reviews and managed to sell some of the episodes in the respective stores. Not the least due to promotions by Google.

I developed Marbelous! almost completely on my own including Concept, Gameplay, Logic, Design, Music and Distribution. However the Level progression was done by a good friend of mine Christian Patorra. Many thanks to Christian!

Ziano

When online storage was expensive, databases only available for a wealthy minority and php was the scripting language, that most hosting providers offered, I created my own CMS.

This CMS powered various websites, I created for clients together with Oliver Hartmann, who was responsible for the design work and getting the clients. Shout out to Olli!