How do you experience working in a German company and living in a German city?

Regarding the company, everybody is making an effort. You really notice that the people here are trying to make you feel at home. For example, everybody tries to break out of their comfort zone and speak English to me. This makes it much easier for me to fit in. You can also recognize that more and more English-speaking people are joining the company. For instance, it happened to me once that a meeting was in German and when I entered they started speaking English. Meetings are held more and more in English. In this respect, the e-commerce company is making a continuous effort to be attractive for foreign developers or generally foreign employees.

Talking about Stuttgart, it is really nice! It is super green for a main city. And the Germans are nice, too. What I especially like is that Stuttgart is very well connected when it comes to travelling – you can be in Munich or in Frankfurt in two hours.  And other countries like France and Switzerland are close as well which makes it easy to travel.

How does your daily working routine look like?

Normally, I start with a daily meeting: At ten we sit together and plan the activities for the day. For this purpose, we use scrum. Like this our manager can see, how  much time it takes to develop certain things. We also discuss objectives and our next steps. In addition to that we have common talks with the team or the design team, discuss topics and different approaches.

Which tools do you use?

We are using Android Studio, Zeppling (a tool, where we see the designs of our designers) and Invision (another tool to test the design and the user experience), Rocket Chat for communication purposes and other tools like Zoom, contentfull, Mixpanel, Rich Relevance, Jira – and many more of course.

With which teams do you interact on a regular basis?

We normally interact with the Design team.

How do you see the future of mobile within Breuninger?

Right now, we are launching the new mobile app with basic functionalities. But for the future, we will search for new functions, see what works and what doesn’t work, be innovative. We like to try many things with the help of many developers. Within the next years we plan to create more apps for Breuninger. The focus is on the consumer app first, but lots of other teams have some “app-requests” as well, like the multichannel team, for example.

What fascinates you about mobile development?

Ubiquiosity! (“The state in which things are no longer consciously perceived because of their omnipresence”, spinforvariety 2017) – This is the fancy term our teacher used at college and I like it, too.

Phones have all kinds of sensors. For example, your app knows stuff about you, it knows that you are moving. The application can track your behaviour and predict future behaviours with the collected data. You can choose your location and receive information about it. The data allows us to see what the consumer does and how he behaves. This ensures a better experience without specifically saying what you want and you can find new stuff you didn’t know you wanted!

I chose this job, because the e-commerce sector and the related technology, for instance, in the mobile world is constantly changing and developing – every year there is a new version of mobile updates, there is always something new. You cannot ignore it, you have to stay tuned.