I am Johannes Geppert, an engineering leader in Leipzig and a member of the Apache Software Foundation. This blog has been my space for over fifteen years, mostly a place to write about software, open source, and whatever else I happened to be working on.
These days most of my writing energy goes somewhere else. I am finishing the first full biography of the chess grandmaster Jacques Mieses (1865 to 1954), a great-great-uncle of mine, due in spring 2027. The research lives at mieses.info, and from time to time I write here about the book and the archive work behind it.
What I do
I work at Amazon as a Software Development Manager. Most of my days are spent with people, processes, and the kind of writing that has to be both clear and politically survivable. I started my career as a Java developer and gradually moved into management, which means I think more about systems and teams now than about code.
Open source
I serve on the Apache Struts PMC since 2009. I write less code than I used to. These days it is mostly reviews, release votes, and the mailing list. I created the Struts2 jQuery Plugin and the Struts2 Bootstrap Plugin (and more), and I have spoken at ApacheCon Europe and re:publica about open source and the Apache Way.
Writing
What you find on this blog is a mix of older technical posts (mostly Java, Struts2, jQuery, and AWS) and newer pieces about the Mieses biography and the work around it. The technical posts I leave up because someone occasionally still needs them. The newer pieces are where my attention is now, and the older ones are partly in German.
Find me
- LinkedIn for professional contact
- GitHub for the code
- Twitter / X for personal stuff
- @JacquesMieses for chess history
- mieses.info for the biography project itself
- My ORCID profile
- Apache profile @jogep
If you want to write to me directly, the contact page still works.