Projects of my own
From the idea to day-to-day operation: web applications that I design, develop and run myself.
The rufname.com portal is a large reference work for first names of all kinds. The project started in 2014 and today runs on a current Symfony version with PHP and MariaDB, with Bootstrap in the frontend. A compact backend was built to maintain and manage the data. Besides the various listing categories, it includes comment, news and sitemap modules, among others. Features such as a watch list and votes make the website more interactive.
The portal nachbarland.de shows the location of 197 countries of the world, their neighboring countries and the length of their shared borders (in German). An interactive world map lets visitors pick continents and countries and jump from neighbor to neighbor – ideal for school, quizzes or travel planning. Rankings such as the countries with the most neighbors show how the states of the world are connected. The project started in 2026 and is based on a current Symfony version with PHP and MariaDB.
The blog programmieren-optimieren.de offers PHP tutorials, code snippets and examples around web development (in German). Since 2010 it has collected articles on PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, WordPress and Ubuntu – practical, straight from my everyday work as a developer. The website ran on WordPress from the start and over time was migrated to a custom blog system built on Symfony with PHP and MariaDB. Many of the articles are now very old and no longer technically up to date – yet out of pure passion the project has never been shut down, but has been renewed and brought up to date again and again.
The guide braunwerden.de shows how to get a nice and healthy tan (in German). The website explains how a tan develops and how to treat your skin responsibly – when sunbathing, in the solarium and when using self-tanners, sunscreens and bronzers. This project also runs on Symfony with PHP and MariaDB.
The blog SEOMEO.de covers search engine optimization, online marketing and web development (in German). Since 2012 it has collected articles on topics such as domains, link building, social media, search engines and making money with web projects. Originally started as a WordPress blog, SEOMEO.de now runs on the same custom blog system built on Symfony with PHP and MariaDB as programmieren-optimieren.de.