Personal website
A simple place for milestones, lessons, and the work behind the projects.
Milestones
A timeline of turning points, projects, and lessons. Some milestones are personal, some are professional, and together they show how the work grew out of real life.
March 2026
In March 2026, I published my first open-source project: a mobile remote for Codex. The idea was simple and personal. Codex runs locally on my computer, and the app lets me steer it from my phone when I am away from the desk, on iPhone or Android. I built it for myself first, then decided to share it with the community and add the GitHub link to this milestone.
November 2025
From late 2025 on, I never stopped coding. I stayed current with the newest AI coding workflows, spent roughly 80 percent of my time shipping new features and 20 percent improving the workflow itself, and in November 2025 I started building Fludge. It is the logical next step from my YouTube background and our virtual production work: an AI-powered production studio where creators can upload footage and get a full YouTube video back, including research, script support, edit decisions, thumbnail, title, B-roll, effects, upload flow, and human guidance where it matters.
October 2025
After building more serious agent systems, I wanted to sanity-check my level against people deep in the developer world. My application for OpenAI DevDay 2025 was accepted, and being there gave me a strong signal that I had grown into a genuinely advanced builder. I was proud to exchange ideas with developers, meet people from OpenAI, and even speak briefly with Sam Altman.
June 2025
By June 2025, I had built a large support agent that could understand context, look up customers, verify and merge profiles, perform actions, and prepare everything for a final human approval step. It cut ticket handling time from about one and a half minutes to around ten seconds. That was the moment I realized my daily coding habit had quietly turned into real software leverage.
December 2024
At the end of 2024, I discovered the OpenAI Swarms SDK, a predecessor of today’s Agents SDK, and immediately felt that this was more than a toy. Because I had already learned how to code, I could start experimenting right away and built my first small internal agent for company workflows. It handled real operational steps automatically and waited only for approvals from me or the team.
April 2020
During the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, I got deep into virtual production with Unreal Engine because I wanted to make films in a new way. We used it for music videos inside our production company, and that path pulled me into programming. I made a simple rule for myself: one hour of coding every day, no matter what.
January 2019
By 2019, we stopped splitting life between Germany and California and moved fully to Los Angeles to focus on the business we were building there. Across our companies, the team eventually grew to twelve people. That scale later made the post-pandemic pressure and the need for better systems impossible to ignore.
January 2016
A trip to Los Angeles with my girlfriend changed our horizon. We loved the energy, the spirit, and the blue sky so much that in 2016 we decided to build something in America and started a music production company there. Because my work had become more location-independent, we could move between Germany and California while growing it.
January 2014
After my own concerts, the next dream that pulled me forward was YouTube. I combined two things I had learned as a pianist: people love listening to music, and they love making it when the path feels possible. My early videos broke piano lessons into tiny steps, and within three months around 300,000 people were learning with me. That became Werde Musiker, which still runs today and grew to more than 500,000 subscribers, plus deeper online courses for harmony, ear training, and music theory.
January 2012
By 2012, I wanted to build my own concert, not just play inside someone else's event. Thomas Forschbach & Friends brought more than 70 artists onto one stage, mixed classical instruments with a rock band, and sold out. I repeated the show in 2013 for more than 2,500 people, producing it myself with friends, my own money, and no professional agency behind it.
July 2002
After graduating from Gymnasium at nineteen, I ignored the advice that music was not a proper job and gave myself a year to try it for real. I interned in a recording studio, played live wherever I could, and focused on learning before earning. The first paid opportunities came slowly, then steadily, until music became my profession and Cologne started booking me for its biggest events.
July 2001
At eighteen, I began organizing and leading Catholic youth holiday trips I had first joined as a participant. For the first time, I handled real logistics, group leadership, and budgets of roughly 60,000 Deutsche Mark. I loved bringing people together and discovered that building the whole experience was just as exciting as performing inside it.
January 2000
At seventeen, I started going into the city at night to watch live pianists as closely as I could, sometimes from strange corners where I had the best view of their hands. I would come home late, sit down at the piano, and try everything immediately. That habit taught me as much as formal lessons did.
August 1994
At eleven, I moved to the local Realschule and got a trial keyboard course for my birthday after years of teaching myself melodies on the old home organ in our living room. My parents never pushed me to practice; they simply backed the things I loved. Within months, I switched to classical piano lessons and talked my way into the school band two years earlier than usual because they needed a keyboard player.
August 1990
Around the time I started elementary school in Cologne, I also joined a local football club. That is where I met some of my first close friends, and several of those friendships are still part of my life today.
January 1983
I was born in Cologne, Germany, and grew up what we call 'koelsch-katholisch': Catholic in culture, but loose, warm, and full of humor. Cologne shaped me with optimism, tolerance, openness, and the belief that people from different cultures make life richer. I also grew up with a lot of love and an early fascination with technology, because my father documented family life with photos and video long before that was common.
