onerecord™ and i

In 2022 i started my first job. My first project was working on some computer vision tasks. I worked largely unsupported as there was no senior developer at that company (i dont say this to brag, but just as a matter of fact, i was most likely the most senior engineering person at that company for the time i stayed there). There was a lot of good that came with this, i had a lot of freedom with my actions, on the other hand, i was not very experienced in computer vision at that time, so a more senior colleague would have been very helpful. The company is a research institute, they are government subsidized and most of the projects there are from getting government contracts. when i joined there was such a government funded project to research innovation areas in the air cargo sector. part of this was creating/implementing a new data standard (in collaboration with iata). the actual implementation was outsourced to another company while the research institute provided the project manager (/scrum master) for the project.

To create more awareness for the standard (and quickly onboard developers) iata regularly organizes Hackathons in which some of the industry stakeholders take part in. These are hosted in different cities all over the world by a ‘host airline’. In 2023 I was asked if I wanted to represent my employer in this hackathon and i liked the idea. i already had some solid experience in webdev back then and the onerecord standard (meaning the before-mentioned new air cargo data exchange standard) was just a glorified web api based on semantic web principles. actually a very elegant design, maybe even a bit idealistic, but i digress xd.

For clarification, this isnt a hackathon as you know it. These hackathons are very much ✨ corporatized ✨ (i dont necessarily mean that in a bad way, these are just the rules of the game in this context. if you want to play you would do good to at least be aware of them). As basically all competitors at the hackathon represent a large company. there is some pressure to perform. To reduce the risk of a bad performance it has become almost an untold rule for all the teams to arrive at the hackathon with ready made solutions or at least a good chunk of the work already done. Officially the challenges (meaning which problems the hackathon solutions should solve) get announced several days before the actual event starts so the teams have some time to generate ideas, actual coding is officially supposed to start on saturday morning. The teams then have some 28 hours to implement a solution and create a short video explaining it. A group of industry seniors then judges the results and winners are determined. Depending on which challenge the solution targeted a price is then given to the team and the ‘price check in hand’ pictures get taken. Well, enough theory, lets get to the practicalities xd.

Usually the challenges are quite foreseeable (as they are just the current problems of the air cargo industry as a whole and oriented by the current industry buzzwords), besides that most of the challenges are repeating evergreens such as the ‘developer prize’ awarded to the technically best solution or the ‘onerecord prize’ awarded to the best integration or most innovative usage of the standard. And so it happened that the first meeting discussing the matter of the hackathon happened months in advance xd (tbh this was an extreme case, at least for me, in the following hackathons we were not able to stay this dedicated xd). The first meetings were really short together with other local air cargo companies and only meant to organize who would even send employees to the event. later very quick brainstorms on solution ideas were done and then about 4 weeks before the actual event we decided who would work on which solution. everyone was free to choose what they wanted to work on although there was an emphasis on mixing the teams so that every team had somebody from each organization (so that the likelihood of all organizations being part of a winning solution was maximized 😉).

In the first meetings I didnt even know what this onerecord thing was and at that point i wasnt able to get a good explanation from anyone as it still seemed to be a sort of vaporware. I was told storys of past hackathons where the biggest challenge was to even get an onerecord server up and running. in one of these meetings niclas brought up his idea to create a visualization tool for data in the onerecord standard, he was not settled if this should be done as a vr application or implemented in a game engine or any other way, but he brought up the general concept to use something representing nodes and connections between the data. As I had no idea about the standard and was in desperate need of something that could explain to me what this vaporware everybody liked to say they understood (and some even said they already used in production) was, i very much liked the idea. at that time i was really interested in improving dx and this seemed like the perfect tool for that. It seemed quite obvious to me that the data standard (which contained only an api but due to the apis structure is almost necessary to be implemented with a rdf based database) needed some kind of visualization. as of my knowledge there is no widely used database in the world that does not also have a gui interface and i felt confident in creating one.

So I started with the development which meant understanding the onerecord api first. luckily at this point the development of the open source onerecord server implementation (which was managed by the research organization i was employed by) was at a very useable stage and there was even a usable although sometimes faulty documentation of the api standard available. I was very much free to steer the project in any direction i wanted as I was the only developer in my team, niclas who proposed the idea was only very sporadically available as he was in the middle of finishing his masters thesis and oliver (who was also on my team, not very technical but the glue of the project and a blast to work with) took more of a project management position as he was used to from being the project manager of the before mentioned open source one record server implementation (which for some odd reason they decided to call ne:one (importantly pronounced neon), most likely just because they liked the sound of it and i cant blame them). At that time i was dealing with some personal challenges and a bachelors thesis that i was procrastinating on so this was the perfect distraction for me at that time. step by step i played a bit around with the onerecord api and then started coding. the name we chose for the product was a suggestion by niclas: ’ne:one play’. as the open source server was called ne:one and this was supposed to make working with the standard playful. back then i was in the mood for a plain simple nextjs dev setup (which i continued to use for hackathon projects as i feel comfortable in that environment) and development could begin. with this setup the resulting product would logically be a web app (not a vr setup as thought of earlier). the idea was to use a simple infinite canvas and show the data on there as cards with connections to other cards (back then oliver liked to compare it to miro a lot). First I implemented the canvas myself but in the interest of time I then pivoted to using react flow which is a really comfortable library for working with ’node based uis’ as they call it.

At this point i feel like i have to explain some of the core ideas of the one record standard. one record is generally based on the principles of the semantic web (before crypto people also called it web 3.0 but this term has been hijacked in recent times xd). the idea behind the semantic web is to make the web easily machine-readable, to enable this the semantic web is very structured. Every object in the semantic web has an unique identifier, usually called the URI. Just like in object-oriented programming the objects follow a type system, this type system is defined in a so-called ontology. the onerecord ontology was written by niclas, yes, the same niclas that i was teammates with 😉. A typical type of object in one record is the so-called ’logistics object’, there are also other ones (server info, logistics events etc.), a logistics object can be a lot of different things (as defined by the ontology). For each object the ontology can define its class, subclass, if the object is part of some other object, all its attributes and their units and a lot more things. For example, in ONE Record, a ‘Company’ is simultaneously categorized as an ‘Organization,’ a ‘LogisticsAgent,’ and a ‘LogisticsObject’. It also inherits all the properties from each of these classes, following object-oriented programming (OOP) principles. a company in onerecord can have a contact person, this means, that the company object has a field which links to the person object. All Objects are stored seperately and their URIs are used to link between each other. This practice reduces storing data multiple times as a person that does multiple things has only one unique URI and all the objects just link to this single URI. In case the person decides to get married and their last name changes, all the other objects stay correct and only the person object would need to get updated. Practically you gain the same benefits as with reasonable database normalization (if you are familiar with that concept) but due to the unique identifiers being URIs and therefore globally unique you can even link to data outside of you own database. This means that all data even on a global scale only needs to exist once, as the database layer is shared in a way. Due to this architecture there is what is called a ‘single source of truth’. Another core idea of onerecord is that everybody hosts their data themselves, if there is data from another stakeholder that is relevant to your operation you simply link their data (object URI) in your data object. Whenever data needs to be updated that is not yours a change request can be sent to the owner. there are many distributed mechanisms like this to guarantee smooth operations.

With this knowledge you can imagine that the resulting data is a huge web of connected data objects - a huge graph. while a computer is able to manage this a human gets lost very quickly in the waterfall of get requests and dozens of open tabs one has to endure to understand a very simple dataset. So the idea to make a visualization tool that displays this graph on an infinite canvas was quite logical. To be honest i was even a bit surprised that this had not been done before as displaying semantic web data as a graph is the de facto standard approach.

Before i started coding tran created some ui/ux sketches based on some doodles we had made. we iterated a couple of times over the design until we were more or less pleased with it. I then started implementing and as i had a couple of things to distract myself from at that time the meat of the application was done in a weekend. There were still some bugs and I fixed some of them in the following days and weeks. The project was not the main focus of my work, i was doing my normal work and this on top so i built up quite a lot of overtime during that period (earning minimum wage lol). With all of that done we felt ready for the hackathon event.

The hackathon was in Germany, Seeheim and the hosting airline was lufthansa, the food and hotel were paid by lufthansa and it was great. At the event the ne:one 1.0 server version got officially revealed and daniel from lufthansa hosted servers for all the hackathon teams. he had even hacked in some authentification so it was not possible to interfere with the servers of other teams. this meant that at the hackathon i had some development work to do, as i had to implement the authentification mechanism on the client side. this should have been really easy but as it goes on hackathons somehow i was able to break the app in the process and it had to get worse before i was finally able to get it working again (with a lot of glue and duct tape xd). Tbh to this day i do not know how i managed to break the app just by adding auth but somehow i did it. I feel like my coding abilities in hackathons get significantly worse compared to just hacking at home haha. With a working MVP we started creating the video, in the past i have done some professional video work and i was happy to bring this skill to the hackathon competition. We created the video, with the help of everyone and after 2h of sleep i finished the edit. Of course the video said that the app was completely developed at the event, but these were just the rules of the game. Along with the video we had to turn in some documentation on devpost which oliver worked on, feel free to have a read if you are curious.

That weekend was really exhaustive. Although i had prepared the code already in beforehand the whole weekend (not only the hackathon) was very little sleep. On the night before the hackathon there were free drinks and we sat outside in the warm summer sun til late in the evening. i like physical activity so i was always sleeping an hour less so i could go for a run in the morning (yes, also during the hackathon time xd). There were a lot of little things that all went wrong and needed fixing even though we came more than prepared. I guess thats the hackathon experience. by now im quite experienced with hackathons, i handle it a lot better but back then i really felt it. We won the ‘onerecord’ prize unanimously and i was approached a lot, because people seemed to find the solution genuinely interesting and were interested in trying it out.

Before the hackathon we had agreed with everyone to open source our projects, the agreement was to enable anyone to just pick up the projects and implement them for their use-case in a more production-ready state. So that is exactly what i ended up doing, you can still find the hackathon version of neone play on my github :). neone play had made an impact on the scene and after the hackathon we noticed quite some industry interest in the project. it seemed like it was here to stay and we thought about how we could ride that wave. oliver (in his organizing genius) had seen an advertisement for an accelerator program by the parent organization of our research institute, at that point it was really unclear if this was a reasonable path to take. After some internal debates our department boss gave his green light and we finally decided to try our luck by applying. Indeed we were promptly chosen for the soon to start batch of the so-called ‘Fraunhofer Ahead’ accelerator program. In practice this meant a funding (with conditions) of 50 thousand euros and regular meetings in munich where we would get mentoring on how to optimally grow. also there was the option to get another funding round from that accelerator later if the project looked promising.

On our first trip to munich we were really enthusiastic about the whole situation. the first accelerator checkin was a full week (the following ones were just 2 days each) and it was a really fun one as well. During that time i was in the process of finishing my bachelors thesis so my days looked like: 8 hours of acclerator program, after that we went to the beer garden (it was munich right before oktoberfest, what did you expect xd) and talked for about 2-4 hours with the people from the accelerator program. With the work part being done we would get back to the hotel which took almost an hour, from about 10pm to 3am i would write my bachelors thesis just to wake up the next day at 7am, go for a run, shower, dress, hop on the bus and arrive just in time at the accelerator offices for the next day of mentoring. when our initial one week accelerator checkin was done i had an almost finished bachelor thesis in my backpocket. this was a crazy time in retrospect.

After this first week oliver and i were really optimistic, we felt like this program would really enable us to make neone play be a commercial reality. We got presented a lot of startup concepts, did a business model canvas and all the other fancy methods, all in the first week. This was very interesting, but in the next checkin (as they called them) it was almost the same things and it got repetitive after a while. Some years ago i had read some books on the topic (the learn startup, zero to one, etc.) and was therefore already familiar with the mindset. We were also in a quite unique position with already having a sort of validated MVP while most of our colleagues in the program were focused on finding a business case to create an MVP for. Please dont get me wrong, the people at the accelerator did a fantastic job, they were genuinely some of the nicest and most motivated people i encountered in my (for now very short) career. But somehow we were not able to take this opportunity and make something useful out of it (we meaning oliver and i, as we were the ones who took the project from that point on). At some point we even got a bit cynical and started joking around like ‘oh another business canvas, yay’. We started doing regular work on the trips to munich which was not very effective due to us being interrupted all the time.

With this accelerator it is possible to get into a second phase, which means another 200k in funding and more mentoring. We felt like this did not make sense, as the first round did not really turn out that useful, but our boss was really liking the idea of getting this money as it would be beneficial to the departments budgeting. So we kept going to the meetings while feeling like we were wasting time.

I think we were a bit too close-minded for the program to work, with this accelerator you could either found externally from the research organization or develop the project inside and license it to an external company who could the do the actual selling, support, etc. we decided on the latter because that was a condition from our boss when he allowed us to apply (which makes sense from his perspective, you dont want to lose two of your best employees like that) and on the other hand we didnt believe enough in the idea to bet on it. i wanted to keep studying and oliver was also very much happy with receiving a stable income. I think that is also the reason why we did not get the hoped value from the mentoring, we were not dedicated enough, we were not all in, we did not believe enough in our idea.

Another thing worth talking about are the conditions that were tied to the money. as this was (semi) public money the conditions were a bit weird, we were only allowed to spend the money on travel expenses, consulting/mentoring or on our own wages. this meant that outsourcing development work was not an option. Practically i would have been the only person able to work on it and at that time i had so much overtime (about 300h) that i was nervously looking at how i could lower that figure instead of getting into even more work. remember all these accelerator things were in parallel to the other things we were doing at the company and i was doing university full time as well 😅. Although i liked the project i was not at all willing to do even more work.

This resulted in the project becoming stale, i did not commit any new code, we were still going regularly to the accelerator checkins but our product was not improving and therefore not getting more attractive to our customers. the people interested in the project just pulled it from github and had their fun with it (and rightly so).

two weeks after having turned in my thesis i went on vacation. it was very much needed and even more well-earned. Lying at the beach i got a message from oliver who was attending a virtual meeting by iata. iata was demoing improved version of neone play.

to get some context, henk who was responsible for one record at iata (because in the aviation industry iata is more or less responsible for defining standards and regulations) was able to hire a new role called the api lead dev. davide got the role and (this is me guessing) in order to get familiar with one record the first thing davide did was to further develop neone play. In my opninion this is genius, one of the best ways to get familiar with an api is to build an ui around it. So davide took my hacked together code and improved upon it. it also made sense for iata, they want to increase onerecord adoption (which air cargo stakeholders are not very comfortable with) and improving ux is probably the most direct way to do so.

back to me lying on the beach in portugal, surfboard next to me and getting screenshots of the new features davide implemented. it was good work, he implemented more features (a lot of them were also newly added to the api since the hackathon had happend) and it just seemed like a good deed. to be honest i was really thankful to see at least some movement in the project.

when i was back from vacation promptly a meeting between iata and my research organization was arranged to talk about cooperation possibilities as the both of us wanted to see neone play further developed. the atmosphere was very enthusiastic and i was trying to keep the meeting on topic. i was focusing on neone play or at least one record and my boss who was also in the meeting tried to sell the research organisation as a whole (being the salesman that he is i cant blame him and it did work as well). so a next meeting in geneva was arranged.

At this point traveling for work had become not unusual and it had become almost a sport of mine to see how late i could leave my flat and still make it to the gate. The situation with this meeting in geneva was so, that we would fly to geneva in the morning and return in the evening. i was impressed with this way of flying, it made flying feel like taking the bus (a very expensive one at that). an hour before boarding i was just getting under the shower after my morning run and 30 minutes before boarding i finally left my flat - a new highscore and im pretty sure it is still standing to this day xd. The meeting in geneva was very enthusiastic again and we had a lot of ideas, i was softly pushing the group towards defining milestones or any other kind of tangible agreements and it kind of worked but not really. after this we had a lot more meetings on the matter remotely, i will not go into details for obvious reasons but in the end all the things stayed at the idea stage as nobody was willing or able to take greater steps.

it was that time of the year again, the next onerecord hackathon was about to happen and this time in doha, qatar. oliver and i were quite busy, i was studying 45 credit points that semester (which is 50% more than the recommended amount, for reference) and working my office job, while oliver was almost equally as busy. this resulted in us not really preparing this hackathon which was a first in the history of our organisation taking part in these hackathons. on the flight there i actually did hack together a quick frontend but when we were in qatar we noticed that it was easier to start clean and we scraped it. this meant that suprisingly this time all the development was actually done on location.

this time we teamed up with lufthansa, it was a real blast working together, we laughed a lot and qatar airways provided some of the best breakfast i ever had (i am not joking, i think i wont ever eat french toast better than that in my life). The evening before the hackathon started with free drinks and a flying buffet. we placed ourselves right in front of the kitchen entry where the waiters would leave with full plates and had a feast. at some point we became a bit spoiled being right at the source and started just taking the nice things, it was mostly wagyu beef sticks and fancy sushi rolls from there on. we went to bed a bit late but still at a manageable time and spent the first hour of hackathon time at the breakfast buffet. after that hacking could begin.

this time we really did develop our solution at the hackathon and correspondingly we all pulled all-nighters this time. i developed together with martin and daniel and i loved every second of it. i was not at all at peak performance, the contrary, my head was full with university deadlines i still had to turn in but in the end we had something working. the others helped us as well as they could. they did all the necessary paperwork and documentation that was needed for the hackathon. this time it really was a great team effort. in the end i worked the video and we had something to show for. feel free to look at the devpost article for more details.

our solution was sort of working and had some really cool features, we added some memes to our video and had a good time. we did not expect to win this time as the solution had not at all the impact that for example neone play had and it wasnt even supposed to. these hackathon events are made for networking and just getting more visibility in the industry.

with this mindset and eyes that we had to fight with to keep them from falling shut we sat down when the jury announced that the winners were determined. we were quite sure that our project had not cut it this time but low and behold we actually won! between sleeping if we sat too long and the newfound motivation we walked up onto the stage as we could not really believe it.

To fight the urge of falling asleep while standing we collectively decided to explore the city of doha a bit, when everybody was exhausted from walking (which only took us about 3h at the state we were at) we went looking for a place to grab a beer at. as there is prohibition in qatar we somehow landed in the scamiest irish pub on the top floor of a hotel that i ever saw and ended the evening over some talks about the industry. Before leaving the next morning i jumped into the pool one last time and called it good.

at this point my work life got more and more about answering emails, attending meetings, being at events and less and less of technical things. the time went by, i was still frequently going to munich for the accelerator checkins and we had weekly calls with iata discussing further business but to be totally honest, looking back i could not tell you what exactly i did in that time at work. it was just a lot of little tasks. preparing events, job interviews, giving a university guest lecture on onerecord, sysadmining our onerecord infra, creating documentation, writing emails, a lot of meetings and a lot more things that i dont even remember anymore 😅.

after the last hackathon daniel had shared a link to an iata innovation competition, at first i ignored it.
when the calendar year started approaching its end there were talks in the office on who would go to WCS, that is the World Cargo Symposium. Basically the largest air cargo conference in the world and hosted by iata. it was unclear if i was to go, at this point i was the most junior team member and rationally there was not really a good reason to take me. thanks to me having a bachelors degree i was at least earning a bit more now, effectively about 50% over minimum wage.

For some reason i was curious to go, this time WCS would be in hongkong and i was really intrigued to go there. I decided to take things into my own hands. To increase my chances i submitted an application to the aforementioned iata innovation competition as the best 3 applicants would be invited to WCS with flights, hotel and conference fees covered to present their ideas on the large stage. To make that happen and because i had some other things at work that i had to finish up on i worked the first week of winter break (another week i spent on university work 🥴🤪 and then i finally took some days for vacation). As i did not have the time to develop something dedicated to the WCS competition i just reentered neone play as it was still a state of the art tool. At least a tool that would be very good for upper management to see to improve understanding and acceptance of onerecord in the industry. i only advertised the features i created, none of the ones davide brought in later. and that was that, i made a nice video, wrote a 10 page ‘research paper’ that i hoped nobody would dare to read, sent it and forgot about it.

To my surprise it actually worked. I got invited. (Just on a side note, who would have thought that being really into cameras as a kid and later doing cinematography as a hobby/sidehustle would have been this useful xd)

Right as march rolled around the corner i finished my semester, i had been jocking along at work for the last month while i was in exam season. wcs was about to happen and the next onerecord hackathon would be the week after wcs in shenzhen. right after that we were to head to st. gallen in switzerland for their universities startup event called the start summit to look for possible investors for neone play, this was part of our accelerator program. to say it short, we had a full schedule.

I wrote my last exam on thursday and on saturday i was sitting in a plane headed to hongkong enjoying the food in business class. yes thats right i flew business to hongkong and lets say after doing that i can understand why people are spending the extra for business class, atleast on qatar airways i would almost say that it is worth it. but lets take a step back, how did that happen? in the end my employer decided that they would take me along to hongkong afterall and as this was a trip long than x hours and I had a meeting first thing the next morning it was allowed by german law to fly business class (i cite german law because all of this was funded by the german taxpayer, to be honest i am not sure on how i feel about this, but i wont get political here). on the other hand this meant that i did not use my free flight provided by iata and it just expired. in hongkong there were meetings and events without end, from the face group, onerecord working group meetings, a hongkong airport tarmac tour, some private dinners to which i was invited as i was one of the finalists of the so called ‘face up’ competition and probably a lot more i dont remember.

Maybe i should explain something about events like this, although they are work, they dont exactly feel like it, they are for sure not vacation, it somehow has the vibe of a classtrip. everybody knows everybody, most of these people have been working together for decades and with the freedom of not being home, a lot of paid for food and often also drinks the vibe is very exuberant (if that is the right word). There is very little sleep and dont get me wrong people do a lot of business at events like this. but this is not the place to discuss very technical things, this is a place to make connections and have fun, whatever that means for you.

On the first day i met the other two contestants, one of them was niclas who i already knew very well as he worked next door to our office and we had teamed up on my first onerecord hackathon and the other contestant was arjan, a really nice, soft-spoken guy from the uk who was focusing on sustainability. we got to know each other as we had lunch at the marriot hotel with a direct view over the waterfront towards the airport (writing this i notice how incredibly posh it sounds).

while attending meetings daniel and i were preparing some code bits for the upcoming hackathon (we were teaming up with lufthansa again for the hackathon, at this point this team constellation felt like the dream team everybody was happy to be a part of). when wcs began i had a pretty rough regime, waking up a half past 6, going for a quick 5k run (during the business trip i got my 5k pace on the treadmill all the way down to 3:25min/km (thats 5:30min/mile) 😏), after that i showered, went to breakfast, which already felt like an informal meeting as it was handshakes and getting to know new people all the way, then rushing over to the convention hall as it was my job to stand at the company booth and talk to people who were interested in the research we offered. At 5pm, when the convention part was done there were meetings and dinners to attend. Usually after that we would just hang out all together, sometimes at the bar, sometimes in the city. these hangouts were a lot of fun because most of the people in the industry are very forthcoming and a breeze to be around, but the conversations were always one buzzword away from becoming serious discussions on what is wrong with the current state of the industry etc etc. Most evenings ended between 2 and 4am. The next day all the same fun began again, this was an incredibly interesting time and while exhausting i really enjoyed it. dont get me wrong, i knew i would need a break when i would get home but it was very much good for the moment.

You might be wondering now what i was doing exactly at a commercial convention as an employee of a (partly, depending on the definition and current research projects mostly) publicly funded research organization. Well I was asking that myself too, we were selling research, yes that means that we were not selling a product for the customer but rather selling that we can investigate things for the customer, tell them if the thing they wanted was even doable or what the best way to do it was. in the past the department had even planned whole airport terminals to be built for customers. i think it was even planned to create software but as you can guess from the neone play situation the capacitys for that were not really there 😅. i think in modern terms you would call this selling consulting. Knowing the internal structures i just was not sure what we were knowledgeable enough in to consult other people about. onerecord would have been a topic that would have made sense, i was familiar with the topic and would actually be able to help someone with that. On the other hand, there were areas where I was pretty sure our team lacked expertise (at least from what I had seen), and I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to sell those services. i also felt overwhelmed from areas like air cargo specific robotics consulting or logistics handling that i simply was not deeply familiar with. Well lets say it was a challenging ballet of knowing when to send a potential customer to a colleague of mine and let them do their magic or convincing the people myself when they were interested in areas where i expertise. this tactic seemed to be working rather well.

Due to me being there for work and as i was the lowest in rank i was determined to be at the booth most of the time (unless of course i had an important event to attend due to my being part of the face up challenge). The others tried to be at the booth as much as was doable but also went to talks they deemed important. As it was a conference i had full understanding for that and to be honest i would have wished to do the same, at least going to the onerecord talk by henk would have been nice but i guess that was the price i paid for flying business 🤷🏻‍♂️.

lets talk about the face up challenge, besides being invited and having most things paid for, we were also supposed to present our ideas on the center stage on the last day as the last event before the conference was officially closed. after the 3 of us were done presenting a qr code would be shown on the large screen and the crowd would be asked to vote for the project that resonated the most with them. after some minutes the winner would be announced, the prize for winning were 7 iata trainnings if i remember correctly (exciting, right? xd). in short, the main prize was actually being chosen to go there i think, everything else was just a bonus on top. I had prepared my presentation at home in an afternoon during exam season, it was done quickly but it did the job, to be totally honest it was not really important to me to win, i was mostly there for the experience. I tested it on a colleague of mine who was also going to be on stage at wcs and he liked it.

on the second to last day the gala dinner was scheduled, this meant all the speakers and sponsors were invited which conveniently resulted in all my colleagues and i getting to eat some fancy food. we got to experience some of the most on point waiters i have ever seen (if your fork was laying only slightly of angle next to your plate it would be corrected by a waiter in less than 20s, you might think i am exaterating but i am not, i feel a bit bad we tested it … with a stopwatch). And of course the organizers were not shy about gifting to the attendees. as this is an event targetted at the creme de la creme of the air cargo industry (meaning ceos and other influential people) i was not surprised by the wealth presented but i was still impressed, especially with the perfectionist attitude that everything was done with.

On the way home i talked with my boss about my planned exchange year that i got approved by him months ago (actually i asked him about it on the day of the geneva meeting from earlier about) before even applying. now that i actually got a confirmation from the university i wanted to check in with him again. he was not amused at all about it. i felt a bit betrayed, this was clearly communicated by me in beforehand and i had more overtime than was healthy. he did not like the idea at all this time and tried do discredit first the idea and then me. At some point we changed topics as it was obvious that this would be a dispute to be settled another time but after that the vibe stayed tainted.

Once we arrived at the hotel we decided to grab beers as all of us were quite exhausted and we wanted to reflect on the wcs and how it had been up to this point. after some talking i showed the presentation that i had made for the next day. originally we had planned that i would present once in front of my colleagues before going to the big stage and we wanted to do this on the first evening in hongkong but one thing came to the other and we were all busy that evening. and as the wcs progressed it was not getting better. things went their way and we only came to it on the evening before the presentation. after i was done presenting my boss told me that it was one of the worst presentations he had ever seen.

At this point i knew that he was still mad about me wanting to do an exchange semester (that he had already given his approval of in the past) and now somehow had decided to make me pay for it. i honestly dont know how exactly he imagined that to work but i just stayed calm, when people want to play games with me (especially in ways like that) i dont want to be a part of it. even if he honestly felt that way, i dont see a reason to be this negative to a 20 year old on the evening before his first ever talk in front of a large audience with more than a thousand people watching. in my understanding a good boss would have communicated his discontent in a more agreeable way as to be a support for their colleagues and not unwantingly sabotage them. but maybe thats just me, with this being my first job i obviously do not have any other experience to compare to.

I played along, tried to understand his criticism and found it to be partly valid, my presentation was a bit too technical, in the following hours we reworked it (not without some comments questioning my competency in operating a computer). at half past 3am i had a shorter and less technical presentation. Dont get me wrong, his critique had a place, i had done the mistake of talking a little too technical to a largely non-technical crowd (mostly ceo’s or people with a similar technical understanding of software) who just care about real-world impact. what i am critzing here is the way he transported this message, in my opinion this was not acceptable.

there would have been nothing wrong with telling me ’erik, i know i told you that this exchange semester thing would be ok in the past, i am really sorry, circumstances have changed and i am not able to hold my word in this regard’. That would have been honest and i would have respected that. making comments at 3am on my knowledge of powerpoint being bad and questioning my abilities as a programmer was just petty and to be totally honest i was disappointed. i sucked it up that time, kept my pokerface and just went with it because i did not see the value in escalating the situation at that point. i wanted to be the one standing above it, a position i would have expected from my boss if i am being totally honest but now it was my time to be the mature one.

I went to bed at 4am and woke up again at 7am. It was the usual 5k run in the morning, skipped breakfast and went to the booth as it was my watch again. An hour before stage-time i started practicing my presentation with the slides on my phone at the booth. i hadnt had time before that point to do so and half an hour before the presentation we already had to get miced up and everything so it was a bit of a miscalculation on my end there 😅. Now i actually was slowly taking the thing a bit more seriously, i was not interested in winning or losing the competition, to me it was more about proving a point with everything that had happend the night before. we, meaning the 3 face up candidates as well as ildi and megha from iata were sitting at the front of the room so that we could easily walk up to the stage when it was our time to present. the huge stage right in front of us and the room was full as our talks were right before the closing ceremony.

My name was announced, i slowly walked up to the stage, shook hands with brendan who i already knew from our iata neone play meetings and walked right inside the limelight. i said my first word and heard it repeated on the large sound system just a quarter second later echoing through the room. i started my first sentence and made it sound cyclical, meaning the equivalent of ’the sky is blue because its blue’. At this point i held myself for a second which felt like a minute, i noticed that i had nothing to lose at this point (at least thats what i told myself), i felt a big relief and had a quick laugh about the stupid sentence i had just formulated out loud, pressed the button for the next slide and started my presentation. i started a bit tentative and careful but sentence by sentence, slide by slide i got more comfortable, just like an old steam locomotive i started gaining traction and at the end of my 7 minutes i was told i even had a charismatic energy. the room clapped and i was quite happy to leave the stage. while the other two presented their talks i just sat on my seat, whispered back and forth with megha and was in a state of residue panic sweat and relief that the most challenging part of my business trip was finally done.

we, meaning the 3 contenders, had agreed on not taking part in the vote (later i got told that some of my colleagues voted multiple times for me which i was not too happy with but on the other hand being totally honest i dont know if had said anything about it to them in that moment). At this point very little mattered to me, i was just happy that the thing was done and i had done a seemingly passable presentation. we could just have gone home collectively at that point and i would have been more than fine with it. brendan opened the vote and after 5 minutes which i spent chatting with megha about brendans sock choice of the day and what a nice guy he actually seems to be the winner was announced. brendan had said my name and i was not sure if he just was about to name all the competitors again to raise the tension or if that was it, i just stayed sitting when megha gave me a nice push to finally get on the stage and take the trophy. i did not really believe it but walked up the stage and was handed the prize. at this point i couldnt care less about it but the room of 1800 poeple clapped and i was happy to be a part of it.

I was told that it was planned to show the vote result on the big screen but because the difference between first and second place was surprisingly large they decided not to. i honestly hope this means that my colleagues trying to help me out did not influence the end decision.

pictures were taken, after that i sat down at the table in the front of the room again and just appreciated brendans last closing words for the conference together with my new found inner calm. when everything was done my colleagues and i debriefed in the now empty meeting hall and it seemed like the events from last night were forgotten. i was only partly happy with my performance as i had a difficult start on the stage but at this point i could not care less and in general i saw this as a learning experience. people came by gratulating me, some were interested in learning more about this neone play thing i had talked about and it was generally a very nice atmosphere. but of course i couldnt stay that way, i dont want to go into details, but some drama occurred with someone (this time external to my company). we tried to talk it out but that did only temporarily solve it. I was very relieved and nothing could change that, so when the situation seemed handled i almost instantly forgot about it and went my way.

as the conference was over now there was finally some free time, we got together with some people and decided to do a trip into the city. finally the suits were off and we genuinely had a great time. i really enjoy spending time with the people from the industry (at least the ones i interacted with). we had a great night exploring hongkong, chatting about all things life and eating (among other things) chicken feet.

The next morning oliver and i left hongkong and went on our way to shenzhen as the next onerecord hackathon was about to start. the border crossing was a little adventure in of itself and i am pretty sure it was captured by more cameras than have ever seen me or will ever see at once ever again. on the first evening in shenzhen the hackathon organizers invited all participants for dinner. we were eager to try some native chinese cuisine but were surprised when we were brought to a German-themed restaurant in the center of shenzhen. dont get me wrong, relative to the distance this restaurant was from germany it was impressively good and my colleagues were really happy with the beer selection but it seemed weird to be on the other side of the globe just to eat food from home. To our surprise, our hackathon team got assigned 3 more local teammates that evening (we were the only team who got some ’local support’ and of course we could not refuse this gesture of friendship). we got to know out now found team members at dinner. more precisely it were two team mates, two twenty-year-old computer science students and one mentor who was a professor at a chinese university. while talking he told us that his wife drove a maserati and from that point on we lovingly nicknamed him professor maserati. At first he tried to get us to start drinking but after all the stress of wcs my colleagues were really in the mood which manifested itself in two of them drinking more or less 10 glasses of beer each. professor maserati who was eagerly trying too keep up had to quit after his 4th beer. this seemed to have made a lasting impression on the professor as he later asked my colleagues jokingly at 4am while developing during the hackthon if they wanted a coffee or a beer. We stayed in that restaurant and left as last, half an hour after place had closed, we had skipped the official bus that was supposed to drive all hackathon contestants to the hotel and decided just to walk and explore the city. as western mapping services work incredibly badly in china we wandered through downtown shenzhen for about 2 hours, at last orienting by the gps location of a picture somebody from the group had made of our hotel and getting cctved all along walking streets up and down trying to find our way home.

At the hotel we went to a room and talked about the prospects of onerecord until 2am with an incredible view from the hotel windows onto shenzhen. At that point we collectively decided it was time to go sleep as the hackathon was starting the next morning.

The next morning all of us arrived at the lobby more or less punctually and we made our way over to the hackathon facility where we welcomed the first cup of coffee into our hands. our teammates arrived a bit late, especially the professor looked a bit tired, but we were happy to start hacking. There was quite a language barrier to overcome between our new teammates and us but we figured it out somehow and got to work. again we scraped all the premade code we had prepared as was tradition at this point. This time we were almost putting out a cookie-cutter hackahton project. fueled by coffee we put our heads down for hours at a time with a break every now and then for some food or to talk to a regional colleague that had come to visit us. This time we took a one hour sleeping break which turned out to be a shower and 20min power nap which turned out to be very refreshing.

we were a really well-rehearsed team by now, on the other hand all of us were a bit grumpy as we already had a sleepless week before the hackathon but we made it work and in the end there was a software solution and a video to show for.

although we thought that it would not be enough to win this time for sure we were the first winners to get announced. we just walked to the front and took it. there wasnt even real joy in the moment (at least for me), it was just doing my job or doing what was expected (the little perfectionist in me would not have been able to do it any other way anyways, no matter the circumstances) and somehow it turned out to be a winning move. Dont get me wrong i was incredibly grateful for all of this, but at this point it was just a lot and i was in need of a break. if i dare to say so, im pretty sure i was not the only one on our team. if you are interested in the details of our project this time you are welcome to have a look at the devpost article.

oliver and ifinally done with the program points that included hard deliverables and decided to make a trip to the shenzhen e-markets, i mean after all we were in shenzhen and were astounded by the districts richness in fake apple watches and phone cases of every shape and color and apple vision pro copies while the original wasnt even out yet. on the way home we almost fell asleep in the taxi but somehow still made it home safely. the next day we got back to hongkong again via the land border and spent another day in hongkong. the day after that we flew business class back to munich from where we rented a car to get to st gallen for the start summit.

we did that convention. we did not find any meaningful investment oportunitys for neone play but we were not really believing in it at that point, well maybe we also were just too tired. we stayed in Rohrschach which is a really calming little town next to st. gallen and it was good to wind down a bit after the previous weeks. thanks to jetlag i was waking up at 4am and actually updated neoneplay to be able to easily adjust to new ontologys so that neoneplay would stay up to date with the evolving data standard. neonplay had slowly begun getting outdated and this was a step to prevent that but again it was more of an hack. as we were planning (and more or less believing it) to make a commercial product out neoneplay these commits stayed proprietary. In my mind a commercial version would need a complete rewrite anyway so i was not very concerned about it.

after that trip i had a weekend at home followed by a trip to munich for another accelerator meetup, this one was quite interesting as it showed us an option of how our organization would be able to make neone play a commercial product. maybe for clarification, officially this semi-public research organization is not allowed to sell products directly, only license the rights to others for them to sell it. we got presented an opportunity to build a business structure like that with a company that specialized on this kind of business model. this had been a burning problem for the last months that seemingly had found a solution now and oliver and i were looking more optimistic on a commercial reality of neone play for the first time in months.

finally after that trip i got on to an vacation, i walked the camino de santiago and i was in desperate need of it. because people asked that a lot, i did not have any spiritual awakening of some kind xd, but in an interesting way that i only got to understand a lot later it taught me some things about my inner nature and how i wanted to approach life.

back at the office i had newfound motivation and ideas but noticed very quickly that i had still the same general workday stuffed with meetings, doing and a lot of little tasks that never let me get to some actual productive/creative work. also after the last business trip i noticed that work life balance had become more important to me and i started slowly reducing my overtime (which had built up at that time to impressive numbers) and tried to limit work to only my predefined work hours.

the next semester began, another 40 credit point semester and again i experienced a competitive amount of workload. at some point in the semester i was unfortunate enough to experience some personal complications which i felt necessitated to allocate more time to. My focus was always on education and in my mind i worked more or less on the side, therefore the decision was obvious to cut down a bit on work. I scheduled in some vacation days at work (I had almost none used up at that point as until now i only had reduced my overtime for vacations) and my boss approved all of them in the internal system. i scheduled some more overtime reducing off time during my upcoming exams. All of this i put in the public team calendar for everyone to see months in advance and communicated the dates to all the people i was directly working together with and my boss. he said he was fine with it as long as i had communicated it with everyone i was working together with and was getting after all my duties (important meetings, accelerator checkins etc.).

At some point, several weeks later, my boss wanted to have a talk with me about my time off, the time off that he had already approved in beforehand. we scheduled a meeting and after the things that had happened in hongkong i was almost expecting another case of complications. By the way, after that situation in hongkong i had canceled my already assigned exchange semester as i was more interested in working at that time and i understood that my boss was (unlike his first promise) not ok with it. Back to us sitting in our meeting room at 8am and just as i had expected my boss was very eager to discuss the possibility of adjusting my vacation schedule to reduce my vacation time. the vacation that he had already signed of on. calling it a possibility in this context would be an euphemism, he literally told me that he would not let me have this much vacation in that time span (remember he had already signed it of officially). the atmosphere got a bit heated as i had already planned with this free time and was a bit tired of him not being able to keep to his word. we ended that conversation with me giving up a part of my vacation. later that day i noticed that this was not at all in my interest and that the relationship i had with my boss really was not how i imagined my work life to be. other than that there were more things about the style of leadership that were not fitting to the way i operate. i had addressed these things openly in the past.

after this last conversation i decided to quit. i noticed that i was not comfortable working in that environment anymore. at that point in time i had done almost no programming for the last 6 months at work and also hadnt learned anything new on the job programming-wise and even generally it felt like stagnation. My boss behaving in such irrational ways tipped the scales for me. Please dont get me wrong, i was getting along great with everyone else at that organization, i really like the people there. the fact was just that i always worked because i had fun doing so and this had changed now. And so it came that i submitted my resignation.

In an earlier version of this blogpost i had written about some of the details connected to my resignation. Mostly involving unpleasant social interactions and efforts to avoid compensating me fully. I ultimately chose to remove those specifics, as they felt out of place in the overall narrative.

Well, it took some time for this war of roses to finally end but when it was done i was finally free and happier than ever to finally be done with it. I focused on university, on the before mentioned personal things and even had some free time to learn new things as well as creating this blog.

I want to end on a positive note here. unfortunately this story got a bit complicated at the end but overall i am incredibly happy and very thankful for the past 1.5 years. i learned a lot, a lot about the workplace, a lot about the air cargo industry, a lot of the good and some about the bad and honestly i am incredibly grateful for everyone who i was able to get to know. I made a huge amount of fun memories and it was very fun to share just a small tad of them here in this blogpost. Writing this blog post was a real joy. Initially i thought this would be just a couple of paragraphs but it grew to be so much more and i really had to hold myself back to only add the most important parts of the story (although i couldnt stop myself from also telling some of the funny moments in here).

Seeing other people still use the tool i made years ago at the istanbul onerecord hackathon was somehow really inspiring to me. it showed me that a single person can still make a change i the world and can have influence in a seemingly very large industry. i still really like the idea behind one record and i think i will toy a bit around with it in the future xd.

If you feel like adding something to this story, think there is something misrepresented (all of this i have written up from memory) or just want to chat i would be more than happy to, feel free to contact me.

the goal of this blogpost was to give a genuine view into the industry, the path i took in it and maybe even give the current managing generation a view into how (atleast a part of) my generation sees the world. If you got all the way here, thank you for reading this wall of text, i really hope you enjoyed it :)