About

The Story

Trained chef. Ex-Navy. Ex-cruise ships. Current 40-ton truck driver. Longtime internet person. Vibe coder building Laravel apps, self-hosted tools and WordPress plugins — with AI as co-pilot. All of the above, simultaneously, since roughly forever.

Private scribbles live at mifupa.com.

The Journey

How This Happened

A TikTok video about n8n. That's where it started. "Just play around with it for a bit." Famous last words — a few weeks later there was Donau2Space.de, an entire blog run by 78 n8n workflows. Building it, I kept needing WordPress plugins that didn't exist quite the way I wanted them, so I built those too — BreznGEO, BreznFlow. That was supposed to be the whole hobby.

Then came Schneespur. A colleague needed a way to document winter-service runs — the proof that a road really was cleared and gritted. I built it for him. And somewhere in there the hobby quietly got bigger: Schneespur grew into a proper Laravel app (Wintertrace for everyone outside Germany), the kind of thing people actually install and depend on.

From there, one thing kept pulling the next out of the ground. Those installs need updates — so I built Jenni, my own release-and-update server. Then the app wanted modules. Then the modules wanted a shared API of their own. Then one of those modules — a small signing helper — grew up into NoSign, a full self-hosted e-signature engine and a project in its own right. None of it was planned. It just grew, one "wouldn't it be nice if…" at a time.

And there's always another idea in the drawer — like Rastplatz.app. I'm not a trained programmer. I'm a truck driver who finds building things fun. Turns out that's enough.

The Philosophy

The honest version: I vibe code because it's fun. Because I think it's genuinely cool that a non-programmer can still build real, working software. I'm not trying to stamp the next million-euro startup out of the ground, and I don't want a million installs. It's a hobby — and if a project helps just one person, that's already worth it to me.

Take Rastplatz.app. Across Germany — across Europe, really — there's a serious shortage of parking for trucks. I won't fix that. But if the app helps one driver find a spot at the end of a long shift, it did its job. Same with Schneespur: if it saves one operator one bad afternoon, it was worth building. That's the whole metric.

I've been online long enough to know the "11pm white screen" feeling when something breaks on a site you care about. I've been there — and I will never be the reason someone else has that moment. Everything here runs on my own sites and installs first, in real conditions. If I wouldn't use it myself, I don't ship it. Nothing goes from idea to "download it now" in a week — there's a testing phase, then another, then probably one more.

Why GPL? Why free? I pay for plenty of software and think premium is fine — the developers deserve to eat. But these are mine, built for my own use and shared because they should exist. No "Pro" version waiting in the wings, no paywall unlock, no subscription that quietly doubles in price. If something costs money to run (like AI API calls), you bring your own key — I don't want to sit in the middle of that.

One more thing about the AI: it doesn't have the ideas — it executes them. The 78 n8n workflows didn't write themselves; I designed every one. Claude Code doesn't decide what to build — I do. The AI makes me faster and catches things I'd miss. But the thinking still happens in a truck cab at 6am, with a coffee and a problem to solve.