Thomas Christmann - Consulting

Career Highlights

See my life flash before your eyes!

CTO

at Cake (2016-2023)

With over 10m visitors a year looking for help, Cake is the world's leading end-of-life planning website. I joined as the first hire in 2016 an helped develop the product from the ground up. After the company secured funding, I trained and managed a team of full-time developers to implement new product features and make sure that each page is optimized for SEO. I created and maintained Cake's scalable and HIPAA compliant hosting and software architecture, and interfaced with European B2B customers to implement their special compliance and security needs.

Principal Software Developer

at UnifySquare (now Unisys) (2010-2016)

I was responsible for the creation of a new product to add to the company's suite of Unified Communications products. Together with the product team, we built the solution from the ground up and deployed to over 100k seats at several Fortune 50 companies.

Development Team Lead

at Netbiscuits (for eBay, 2006-2009)

My team and I created the official mobile websites for eBay in most European countries. We also created an innovative bidding-by-SMS solution for eBay, that was pre-installed on over 1m Vodafone devices.

Senior Web Hosting Consultant

at Planet (for Microsoft, 2005)

I travelled across Europe on behalf of Microsoft to educate web hosters on the benefits of the Microsoft hosting platform

Windows System Developer

at Ionos (2000-2004)

The team I joined was responsible for creating the first version of managed Windows and Exchange hosting for the company. We worked very closely with Microsoft's internal IIS team to launch the first version of IIS6 hosting in Europe. The platform grew to over 100k hosted websites and 60k hosted mailboxes within a few years.

Technologies and Tools

Some of the languages, tools and products I use regularly

Software Development

ASP.NET MVC, WebAPI, Razor
.NET Core, .NET Framework
EntityFramework, MS SQL, NoSQL
ASP.NET Identity, SSO, OAuth, SAML
C#, VB.NET, LINQ
HTML, CSS, SCSS, Bootstrap
React, AngularJS, jQuery, Javascript
webpack, vite, npm

Microsoft Azure

Compliance and Security
SOC2, HIPAA, GDPR, CISPA
Azure App Service, Functions
SQL, Data Explorer, CosmosDB
Entra, Vault, Defender
Application Insights, Blob Storage
Azure Front Door, CDN
Azure Data Factory

And much more

SEO optimization, Core Web Vitals
Software Architecture and Design
Team lead, hiring
Azure DevOps, git, TFS/TFVC
CI/CD and ETF pipelines
Mailchimp, SendGrid, Twilio, Stripe
Headless CMS (Contentful, Sanity)
Okta/Auth0

Contact me

Why are you here? How can I help you?

Reviews and Feedback

What other people say about me

Thomas possesses a rare talent for making even the most complex technical subjects accessible to all stakeholders, which greatly facilitated communication and decision-making processes within our team.

- Ariel Sherry, Product Manager @ Cake

Thomas was a great boss and a solid developer. I worked with him for over 5 years at Cake, where he played a crucial role in the company's growth, particularly in building the application from the ground up when Cake was in its infancy.

- Annette Arabasz, Software Developer @ Cake

[Thomas has the] excellent ability to explain and present technology in lay terms, as well as excellent client facing skills.

- Duncan Hallas, Client @ eBay

Thomas is one of the best developers I have worked with in the last 10+ years.

- Rohit Jhangiani, Project Manager @ Unisys

[Thomas has the] innate ability to translate complex scenarios in something anyone can understand. But more importantly, it always felt like [he] had our backs and genuinely cared about our well being.

- Tommy Rosario, Software Developer @ Cake