Johannes GeppertI am Johannes Geppert, an engineering leader living in Leipzig, Germany. This blog has been my space for over fifteen years, mostly as a place to write about software, open source, and whatever else I happened to be working on.

These days I spend most of my writing energy on a different project. I am working on the first full biography of the chess grandmaster Jacques Mieses (1865 to 1954), a great-great-uncle of mine, scheduled for publication in early 2027. The research lives at mieses.info. From time to time I write here about the book, the archive work behind it, and the technical side of running a small bilingual research site.

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

For many years I was active in the Apache community. I served as a committer and PMC member on Apache Struts2, created the Struts2 jQuery Plugin and the Struts2 Bootstrap Plugin, and gave talks at ApacheCon Europe and re:publica about open source and the Apache Way. The plugins are still out there on GitHub, though the world has moved on from Struts2, and so have I. The values from those years, working in the open, writing things down, helping the next person along, have stayed with me.

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.

Find me

The best places to reach me or follow what I am up to:

If you want to write to me directly, the contact page still works.