The basis for Attic Solutions

You can expect services that support you in the process of digital transformation and globalization.

Welcome to the Attic Solutions website!

Since I started programming in Perl in 1999, I have closely followed the development of the digital world and overhauled my knowledge 5 times from scratch.

Programming from 1999 – 2004

Alongside my studies in physics, I learned to program. In the beginning there was no PHP, but with Perl I was able to prepare dynamic HTML for display in the Netscape browser and Internet Explorer. In my work as a developer, I had to deal with large amounts of data and learned all sorts of things about computer science from some hardcore developers.

At that time, a euro pallet of paper with error messages was printed out every day. My first program made this superfluous and so I witnessed automation for the first time.

It was the time when host computers and assembler code were slowly being replaced and computers and servers were slowly becoming part of everyday life.

First development of own ideas as an entrepreneur

Due to countless problems and workarounds with the display of HTML 4 in Netscape and Internet Explorer, I turned away from programming in 2004 to build my own brand. I set myself the goal of documenting the culture in Cuba.

In 2005, Macromedia Flash was in vogue and I believed that this would overcome the problems of inconsistent display of websites in different browser versions. However, it soon became clear that Flash had no future after the takeover by Adobe and Apple’s refusal to integrate it into the iPhone.

In the financial world

From 2005 – 2008 I led a banker’s life. I started as an assistant graphic designer at a private bank in Zurich, designing marketing flyers and print documents, but was quickly moved into product marketing to optimize processes. The bank was about to merge with 4 other private banks and so I became assistant to the project manager of the product migration.

This was followed by project meetings, preparation of presentations, meetings with consultants, proposals for process and infrastructure optimization until the old management left the bank after the migration in 2007. I used the time of transition to the new management to expand my knowledge of fund products, structured products and alternative investments such as hedge funds, venture capital investments and stock market trading in general. Under the incoming new management, I took minutes of management meetings at the two top management levels for a while and experienced how difficult it can be to move large sums of money on the markets during the onset of the financial crisis. The danger of structured products, where a large part of the risk lies directly on the bank’s books, also became apparent.

Documentary film production

In 2008, during the financial crisis, I turned my full attention to cultural documentaries and was involved in the production of the documentary THE BLACK ROOTS OF SALSA.

Apple Support and getting back into programming

I started working as an Apple supporter in 2011. It became increasingly clear that system support and hardware sales could no longer be a sustainable business model. The big changes in the internet due to the establishment of mobile devices pointed to a lot of work in web programming.

In 2012, I made a request to the management to set up web development. As a result, I invested countless hours in working on my knowledge of software and web development as well as reading up on marketing and design. I familiarized myself with the CMS systems Joomla and WordPress and began programming my own templates or adapting existing ones. I identified the Bootstrap framework as ideal for the implementation of web solutions that are optimized for both the computer screen and mobile devices.

At the beginning of 2013, the FileMaker development department received an order to program a web solution based on a FileMaker database. It was a platform for the exchange of rare animals among breeders in Switzerland.

My task: Programming a bilingual web application in PHP that allows breeders to place advertisements online. After checking by the breeding club, the advertisement is activated and visible in the overview. The overview is controlled via jQuery and Ajax functionalities.

The web application has been online since the end of 2013 and is actively used. A third language has been added.

Freelance IT Consultant from 2014

From 2014, I supported clients as a freelancer for Dataquest and Medio Ingeno as a programmer and system administrator.

I used the Drupal CMS to realize the website of Attic Independent Production incl. online download of the documentary.

I worked as a developer at the Zurich design agency DesignWerft and got to know the agency environment.

When I developed Attic Independent Production’s new website, I separated the IT services from my cultural work and Attic Solutions was born.

My entry into digital marketing

I had just finished the website atticindependent.ch with the store component for downloading the documentary THE BLACK ROOTS OF SALSA when I was looking for a way to distribute it.

I became aware of a course in digital marketing, which I have been following ever since and which opened up a completely different world for me.

When I discovered the possibilities of the digital world, I knew that this was the future and that I was moving in the right direction.

Thoughts on getting back into IT

After I left development in 2004, my return from 2011 onwards was tough, as all languages had developed substantially. For example, object-oriented programming was only just beginning in 1999 and became relevant with Java. As development evolved, it became clear that a mix of procedural and object-oriented programming could be more efficient than strict object orientation. The MVC (Model View Controller) approach emerged, which is now used in PHP frameworks such as Symfony and JavaScript frameworks such as Angular.

I resolved not to lose touch with programming and the digital world in general again!

Business analysis and consulting

The blog on this page shows the next steps with atticsolutions.ch …

In 2018 I worked as a contractor for Lufthansa Industry Solutions for SBB as a business analyst, where I experienced an asynchronous application based on Angular and Java on cloud infrastructures in action and planned and implemented the redesign of frontend and backend in an agile environment with 3 developers.