About me — Anselm Hannemann

Short Summary

I’ve been a known name in the front-end industry for 19 years and have helped companies worldwide reach their product goals and build effective development teams.

Many people around the world trust my expertise, and I’ve been nominated for developer awards multiple times. You’ll find more in my CV.

I bring my knowledge and experience into other teams and projects. This has helped companies build better products, meet deadlines, and improve agile ways of working in their teams.

I’ve helped companies, charities, and non-governmental organisations with my knowledge to save money, reach more people, and create better working environments. Code isn’t everything for me: in my small vegetable market garden I grow really good food for the region.

Get in touch CV

Frontend expertise

As a freelance web developer I offer programming and design of websites for small and large companies alike — alone or in a team, depending on the project size.

I usually deliver small projects on my own: cost-efficient, sustainable, and built to last. I like working with Kirby CMS here, but Typo3 and other systems are possible when needed.

On larger projects I’m happy to contribute my broad knowledge around web performance, front-end scaling, and project management (including Scrum, Kanban, Lean). Either as consulting and planning before and during project kick-off, or in the actual implementation. On large projects I’ve specialised in scaling CSS, performance and accessibility, as well as process optimisation, and I also offer audits and trainings on these topics.

I invest a lot of time in open-source work, contributing to web standards, and sharing knowledge. Among other things I write articles for Smashing Magazine, t3n Magazine, and more, and I run a well-known industry newsletter for front-end developers, the “Web Development Reading List”.

Modern project management

My project experience with Scrum and Kanban as well as Lean Management across very different teams and project sizes has already helped many of my clients become more efficient while also fostering motivation and calm in the team. I was a certified Scrum Master (the certificate has currently expired).

I’ve worked in various teams as Scrum Master, Product Owner, and Tech Lead, and I’m happy to share my experience with others. It’s important to me to talk about the failures as well — because that’s what you learn from.

Teams should learn to improve themselves and recognise the chance to remove problems on their own.

I work mostly remotely and have already successfully helped establish remote work in teams.

Knowledge and some tools I use

Semantic HTML, accessibility per WCAG 2.2
Scalable and modular CSS, Tailwind, and more
JavaScript / TypeScript
Git, GitLab, GitHub, CI / CD pipelines
Modern PHP (and frameworks like Laravel)
Modern front-end tooling (Bun, pnpm, Vite, webpack, and more)
Agile management (Scrum, Kanban, Lean)
Agentic engineering (Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, local LLMs via Ollama / LM Studio)

Get in touch & CV

I currently have capacity for projects and would love to talk about how we can make your project a success.

Work with me · CV

Podcasts

For over five years I was part of the five-person German Workingdraft podcast and recorded dozens of episodes, often with renowned guests. The podcast is one of the best-known front-end and web tech podcasts in Germany.

I’ve also been a guest on various other podcasts, for example the WWSIV Podcast, WeAreDevelopers, and more.

For over ten years I wrote the internationally renowned WDRL Newsletter. It’s highly valued worldwide by tens of thousands of readers and experts in the web industry and had 18k subscribers.

Writing

For many years I wrote a monthly roundup of web technologies for Smashing Magazine, as well as various other articles that reached hundreds of thousands of readers and were a valuable contribution to knowledge sharing in the front-end community. I’ve also published two articles on CSS-Tricks.com.

I’ve written various magazine articles on front-end technologies and tooling for heise and t3n, as well as the magazine Screenguide and .net magazine.

I’ve had the chance to contribute to several books as an author and to more as a technical reviewer.

Speaking

In the past I’ve spoken at several national and international front-end conferences and events, and held workshops.

MODX Conference 2×
Fronteers Pre-Conference Amsterdam
Adobe Online Video Trainings
video2brain Video Trainings
tgm — typographische Gesellschaft München e.V.
various meetups in Germany

Event organisation

I have years of experience organising both smaller and large tech events.

NightlyBuild Conference

Together with four colleagues I organised an after-work front-end and UX conference called NightlyBuild between 2014 and 2018. It sold out each year in no time, and six internationally known speakers gave talks there each year.

PUBKON Conference

The PUBKON conference was one of the best-known and largest German publishing events and took place yearly between 2012 and 2015. The three-day events featured between 15–20 well-known and lesser-known speakers—a carefully selected mix of high-profile industry figures and new talent. There was also a full day of workshops beforehand. I was one of the three founders and organisers of the events before we discontinued the format in 2015 and I specialised in front-end development.

InDesign User Group Munich Meetups

For five years I organised the InDesign User Group Munich meetups with two colleagues, with about 6–7 events per year.

MODX User Group Munich Meetups

I organised the MODX User Group Munich meetups (~4 per year) for about two years before handing the organisation over to a colleague.

Entrepreneurship

In 2017 I founded the event platform Colloq with two colleagues to put my ethical views and values as well as my technical know-how into practice in a modern, sustainable company structure. Colloq is an event platform that makes it possible to find matching events and to discover their content and video recordings, slides, and more as learning material.

On 31 March 2021 the Colloq platform was shut down. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to make the service profitable in time.

Founder of the Schaufel & Gabel Market Garden

With my market garden and CSA Schaufel & Gabel I grow vegetables for over 60 families, prune fruit trees, and give workshops for farmers and hobby gardeners on natural, sustainable, and regenerative agriculture. This short BR TV feature shows the farm:

Visit the Schaufel & Gabel website