Karsten Silkenbäumer
Engineering Manager at happyhotel
Hamburg, Germany
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolKarsten Silkenbäumer is an engineering manager in Hamburg with 11+ years of experience evolving from backend developer to leader, currently shaping a startup's growth at happyhotel while staying hands-on in backend, frontend and ML. He combines a strong business mindset with deep technical chops—ranging from Perl and Ruby on Rails to modern web stacks—and a focus on requirements engineering, stakeholder management and scalable processes. As a people-first leader he builds cross-functional teams that take ownership, mentors engineers, and often fills technical project manager and tech lead roles to connect multiple teams. An active contributor to prominent open-source tooling (including practical contributions to the well-known CyberChef project), he emphasizes code quality and robust testing. Known for being the “customer” of his own products, he continuously automates and experiments personally to validate solutions.
11 years of coding experience
23 years of employment as a software developer
Diplom Informatiker, Informatik, 1.0, Diplom Informatiker, Informatik, 1.0 at Technische Universität Kaiserslautern
German, English, Spanish, Italian
Stackoverflow
2,359reputation
190kreached
48answers
22questions
perl
top-5%
Github Skills (16)
data-manipulation10
javascript10
encoding10
testing10
data-analysis9
perl9
windows6
hammerspoon6
shell6
bash6
unix6
sed6
regex6
unicode6
ruby-on-rails6
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
gchq/CyberChef
Mar 2019 - Mar 2019
The Cyber Swiss Army Knife - a web app for encryption, encoding, compression and data analysis
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 commits, 5 PRs, 1 comment in 1 day
Contributions summary:Karsten primarily contributed to the implementation and testing of Bacon cipher functionalities within the CyberChef web application. They added both decoding and encoding capabilities for the Bacon cipher, alongside comprehensive tests to validate the cipher's behavior with various alphabet configurations and input types. Furthermore, the user addressed a specific bug related to whitespace handling during AMNZ mode decoding, demonstrating a focus on code quality and robust testing practices. The user also refactored the code by using more descriptive names for alphabet selection.
hashingcyberdata-analysisarmycompression
kassi/Dotfiles
Jun 2017 - Jul 2020
Contributions:103 commits, 131 pushes, 2 branches in 3 years 1 month
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