Edwin Straub

Before anything else, I'm a dad. I have a boy and a girl, and they are the best thing I've ever been part of. My wife and I are raising them in Satu Mare, Romania, where I grew up speaking Hungarian, Romanian, and eventually German and English. Family is where everything starts for me.

I got into computers because of games. As a kid, I wanted to understand how they worked — not just play them, but peek behind the curtain. That curiosity led me to a Computer Science degree at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, and then into a career that has now spanned over seventeen years.

For fourteen of those years, I worked at TBA Group, building simulation software for maritime container terminals. We designed driving behavior algorithms for automated equipment — trucks navigating yards, cranes moving containers, all modeled in software so terminal operators could test, train, and optimize without touching a real port. I still have a deep soft spot for that world: logistics, large-scale simulations, the beautiful complexity of real systems modeled in code.

Along the way, I built a predictive maintenance system using machine learning to anticipate equipment failures before they happened, which led to a published IEEE paper. I also designed APIs for standardizing terminal operating system data and mentored interns and junior developers — which turned out to be one of the most rewarding parts of the job.

After TBA, I spent a year at Thales working on video management systems for critical infrastructure — safety monitoring for trains and stations. Then I joined adesso insurance solutions, where I built a cloud-native internal developer platform using Kubernetes, Quarkus, and Angular. I really enjoyed my time there and met some truly good people. Since late 2025, I've been the Lead Developer on an internal developer platform at a major German retail company, which I'm enjoying very much. I also serve as the Lead for the Java Competence Center at adesso Romania.

What drives me professionally is craft. I care about clean, maintainable code. I care about architecture that makes systems comprehensible, not just functional. I enjoy working with people — helping companies create products that are genuinely useful and built to last. Hiring, mentoring, code reviews, breaking big problems into small ones — that's where I feel most at home.

Outside of work, I love spending time with my family — that always comes first. I enjoy playing football when I can, losing myself in a good book, picking up the guitar, and reading about astronomy. I'm what you might call an armchair astronomer these days — more reading than actual observing, though I do own a telescope that deserves more outings.