I’m Axel Schlueter. I enjoy developing highly usable and beautiful software. Driven by the commitment to create products that exceed the my client’s vision I always strive to push the boundaries of current technologies, user interface design and the perfect user experience.
I have been developing software professionally for over 20 years on a wide range of hardware environments, operating systems and programming languages. After starting with an Atari 1040ST, I’ve since been part of commercial games on the Commodore Amiga platform, toyed with X11, Motif and OpenGL on a number of SUN and SGI systems and developed a carrier grade ISDN Q.921/Q.931 telephony stack on the i386 PC platform.
At the very end of december 1999 I co-founded Aroxis Informationstechnologie and had been its CTO for nearly 10 years leading a team of 5 engineers. At Aroxis I developed emergency CAD (computer aided dispatch) systems. Our software was used in emergency dispatch rooms all over Germany at a number of high-profile events, e.g. at “World Youth Day 2005” in Cologne, Germany or at one of Germany’s largest rock festivals “Rock am Ring” at the Nürburgring.
The second pillar at Aroxis was a suite of applications called ErAMit for human resource management. It provided everything from automated roster generation to payroll services. I started ErAMit as a JAVA-based client-server desktop application running on the Eclipse Rich Platform foundation and later enhanced it with a Rails web application. The web component provided various employee self-management services and time tracking.
In 2010 I was asked to lead the IT team at HUDORA, one of Germany’s largest sporting goods manufacturers. We replaced the then-aging ERP system with a custom in-house solution tailored exactly to HUDORA’s specific needs. After evaluating different platform vendors we decided to use Google App Engine in combination with Python as our implementation language. The project was featured as an App Engine case study by Google.
Starting out as a side business I’ve been developing mobile applications for Apple’s iOS platform since 2008. In March 2012 I decided to make this my fulltime occupation and I’ve since been freelancing as a mobile applications developer for iOS. I also develop applications for Apple’s desktop operating system OS X. For a selection of recents projects on both platforms please see the “Work” page.