About

I am a Principal Consultant at SWAGLab, web architect, developer, trainer and author. Coffee & cycling.

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create. _why
A picture of Lucas in a hoodie, smiling

You can read some of my words on the Fediverse, some of my code on Codeberg and find me hiking and cycling with our dachshund Ruby. I’m fluent in both English and German. I’m writing books about Ruby and the web. And I enjoy drinking coffee a bit too much. If you want to learn more about my setup, check out my uses page and my dotfiles.

Work Experience

Experienced software engineer and team lead, systems architect, consultant and trainer. Two decades’ worth of experience across different technologies and organizations. Co-author of “The Rails Way” book series. Seasoned conference speaker and podcaster. Founder and maintainer of multiple open-source projects. I particularly enjoy collaborating remotely and asynchronously, helping people and organizations grow their potential.

SWAGLab 👕

I work as a Principal Consultant at SWAGLab. My focus remains on the web: architecture, development, reviews, as well as web performance audits, trainings, and improvements. During one of my current projects, I collected hands-on experience with moving a project from AWS to a smaller, European cloud provider. I also offer coaching to team leads.

Break 🏕️

I took a break for some cycling.

komoot 🚲

At komoot, I was working as team lead of the team that built the web client for planning your hiking and cycling trips. The 12-year-old codebase was serving 45 million active monthly users. During that time, we did multiple big modernization and performance improvement projects. I was responsible for professional development, hiring, salary negotiations, reporting, strategic process optimization, and architecture.

INNOQ 🕴️

At INNOQ, I worked on the architecture, conception, and implementation of web applications on the front and back end. I coded in Ruby, JavaScript and Go, helped with technology decisions, and gave trainings and talks on web architecture and JavaScript. I also built up and moderated the INNOQ Podcast.

ArangoDB 🥑

As employee number two at ArangoDB, I worked as a developer and developer advocate on the open-source NoSQL database. I created and maintained the Ruby driver family and Foxx web API framework, as well as parts of the early graph functionality. I also gave talks at conferences and user groups.

Prior to that

Conference Talks

I’ve given many talks at conferences and user groups. I’ve also been a conference organizer (RedFrog Conf 2013 & 2014, eurucamp 2015 and Ruby on Ice 2019) and part of program committees (FrOSCon 2024 & 2025). Here is an incomplete list of my conference talks:

In 2024, I went on a hiatus with conference talks, but now I want to get back to it.

Podcasts & Live Streams

I’ve published and moderated many podcast episodes over the years, 76 of them for the INNOQ podcast and 6 for the CaSE Podcast. My intro into podcasting was as a panelist for 48 episodes of Nerdkunde from 2013 to 2019.

I’ve also been a guest on some podcasts and live streams (incomplete list):

Education

Want to get in contact?

Email me via lucasatdohmendotio. My GPG fingerprint is 1EEF 0573 E355 33E8 1722 042F E203 C1DA 52DA 2D13 – you can also download the GPG key here.