Hi, I'm Lirim Veliu, a Software Architect and Software Engineer from Mühlheim am Main. Ten years ago, I started my career in IT as a career changer. As a trained industrial management assistant, I switched to the IT department during my apprenticeship and started there as an administrator and software developer. My first programming language was RPG, the native programming language for the IBM Mainframe AS400. To quench my thirst for knowledge about software development (and everything related to it), I started studying Business Informatics alongside my full-time job and spent almost every weekend hitting the books for 3.5 years.

I ❤️ Web Development

I fell in love with web development during my first job as an IBM RPG programmer. Looking back today, the IBM AS400 (or Power i, as it is called now) was a robust, reliable, and great system with features that we are essentially "reinventing" in web development today.

But back then, it seemed very archaic to me (see picture below), and development was very tedious. Web development with PHP, HTML, and CSS seemed much more attractive. All you needed was a LAMP stack, and off you went: development was much faster, you could create sexy UIs with CSS, find errors more quickly with Xdebug (or var_dump, lol), access the database quickly with phpMyAdmin, and all the user needed was a browser. Nice.

My first own application was a dashboard for printer consumables. We wanted to see the status of all printers in all departments at a glance and automate the ordering, e.g., for toner. The application was written entirely in Vanilla PHP, HTML, and CSS. I've been hooked ever since. 🤤

When I'm not coding

Away from my notebook, I love spending time with my family and watching my children grow up. The GitHub accounts for my two girls are already created 😉. When I need to clear my head, I play a round on the PC or go archery shooting when the weather is nice.