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Julien Leske · Hamburg & Berlin

Telling large organisations what they did not want to hear.

Then I went into freelance and kept doing it, except now I also write the code.

Before software

I studied psychology.

That is a strange route into software until you notice that most failed products failed for human reasons, not technical ones. Nobody wanted it. Nobody could work out how to use it. Somebody senior wanted it to exist and nobody checked whether anyone else did.

I have never stopped finding that more interesting than the technology, and it is most of what I am actually paid for now.

Two years

A digital agency in Berlin.

Where I learned to build things quickly and to recognise, from the inside, how agencies price work. That knowledge is why I can tell you which parts of a quote are the build and which parts are the layers around it.

Two years

Tech consulting at Infosys, co-managing their startup lab.

Corporate innovation from both ends at once: large organisations trying to move like startups, and startups trying to survive contact with procurement. The lab is where I learned that a prototype settles arguments no slide deck can.

Four years

KPMG: consultant for innovation, digital technology and user experience.

DAX-listed corporates and public-sector clients, building systems used by millions of people. All of it under NDA, and none of those clients will ever appear on this site.

What it left me with is specific: I can sit across from a sceptical stakeholder who has been burned before and not flinch, and I know the difference between a requirement and a preference someone has stopped questioning.

Since 2023

Freelance.

The same work without the layers. No account manager, no handover, no discovery phase that produces a slide deck. The person you talk to is the person who writes the code.

Two clients have now been with me for two years each. Both arrived after an agency quote had already stopped their project.

Languages

German (native), English (fluent), Spanish (conversational)

Stack

TypeScript, React, React Router v7, Vite, Node, Postgres, MongoDB, AWS, Vercel

Based

Hamburg, regularly in Berlin. Remote across the EU.

That is the background. What are you building?