Rent-a-founder

IATA SSIM Flight Schedule Parser

This post likely doesn’t affect most readers of this blog. But since I also write to document my work, this announcement will go here.

I implemented a new commercial software tool which can read IATA SSIM Flight Schedule files (Chapter 7). SSIM files follow a sophisticated fixed-width format and are used to describe an airline’s flight schedule over a specific period of time (usually 365 days into the future). These files are used to exchange schedule information among a large number of airline systems, some of which include:

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Management, Leadership, Motivation, and SCRUM

I’ve worked as a project manager for about 8 years. While it involves a lot of politics, especially when the company or the customer you work for is a larger enterprise, a major part of a project’s success can be attributed to the project team. You definitely want the best team. And that does not necessarily mean the best individual players but people who can work together — comparisons with team sports usually hold. Read more...

Developers Unhappy at Berlin Startups

At many of these Berlin meetups that are happening almost every day now, I bump into developers employed at startups. Maybe it is the nature of these events but I have yet to meet someone who is happy with their employer and who is not looking for a new job. Naturally, I ask them what it is that they dislike so much about their job. The answers are surprisingly uniform. Read more...

Germany’s “Startup Incubators”

Since YCombinator came on the scene, a number of investors have also started to call themselves “startup incubators”. In Germany, there is a group of people who became quite successful with the ever-discussed copycat. Many of them have since gone on to become an incubator. The biggest ones are probably “Rocket Internet” and “FoundersLink” but there are more which may fall into this category. They basically have a list of copycat “ideas” which they would like to implement. Read more...

Starting a Company (in Germany)

We’re at a point now with Stock Performer where we can take money for the service. If it was that easy. Sure, I could put my private PayPal account up there and risk a complete mixup with my personal purchases and Stock Performer subscriptions. And how would I deal with Luis’s part? He’d need to send me an invoice. And I would somehow do my taxes from that which I don’t even know how. Read more...

Business is Simple

There is something I still don’t quite understand. It is the observation that some people manage to always give confusing replies to simple questions. Apart from the obvious I-don’t-want-to-answer tactic, I think it boils down to two reasons: They either don’t notice that the listener is coming from a different point of view or their thinking is simply too complex. The latter one is dangerous and I’ll side with Scott Adams when he claims that after a certain complexity threshold, failure is inevitable. Read more...