Erik Dörnenburg
Head of Technology Europe
What's your favorite ThoughtWorks moment?
This is quite a while ago but for the client I was with in my first year at ThoughtWorks we had to travel to Istanbul. After dinner at a restaurant on the Bosporus a small boat suddenly appeared out of the darkness to pick us up and to bring us to a bar in the Maiden's Tower. This is the tower on the tiny island in the middle of the Bosporus, which I knew from a James Bond movie... One of my favourite travel moments, sitting on that small boat with colleagues who had become friends, the city lights all around us, literally travelling between Europe and Asia.
Why did you join ThoughtWorks?
One of the reasons why I joined ThoughtWorks was that I knew I wanted to keep writing software; nothing wrong with becoming a manager, but it's not for me. Over the years I got more involved with influencing ThoughtWorks' strategy, and now with setting up ThoughtWorks in Germany, but I still enjoy spending about half my time working on code that ends up in production at our clients.
About me
Erik is Head of Technology, software developer, and consultant. He is helping clients with building enterprise software, always on the look out for innovative technology that creates new potential.
Frequent exposure to overly complex architectures has made him interested in simple designs and software visualisation as means to help people better understand architecture.
Erik’s career in enterprise software began in the early nineties on the NeXTSTEP platform, and throughout his career he has been an advocate of agile values and open source software. Over the past ten years, he has spoken at many international conferences, contributed to several books, and maintained a couple of open source projects.