I started at Ruhmesmeile in May 2008. Back then it was a small, independent internet agency in Cologne/Bonn, and over the years it grew into a full-service shop for digital marketing and web technology, working closely with its sister companies Taktsoft and Radikant. My role was Head of Development: building the frontend and backend teams, shaping the development process, and shipping projects for clients across very different industries.

The work spanned relaunches, digital strategies, and product development. We rebuilt Sprengnetter, the European real-estate valuation specialist, as a unified information architecture across several platforms — complete with SEO audits, keyword analyses, and a Scrum-based process alongside Radikant and Taktsoft. We relaunched Kalenborn, the international wear-protection company, as a responsive, content-rich website. We launched sparstrom.de, the Badenova green-energy brand, taking the lead from Taktsoft on frontend development and supporting the UX concept. We did the optical and technical relaunch of Astragon, the simulation-games publisher, just before Gamescom. We developed the digital strategy and responsive TYPO3 platform for Deutsche Vertriebsberatung. We built the online information aggregator piqd with Taktsoft. We brought the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung app into the App Stores. We made films for wirtz-cologne.de and generally spent our days turning messy client requirements into structured, responsive, maintainable web things.

Alongside client work, I helped grow the team — hiring TYPO3/PHP backend developers, frontend/UI developers, and JavaScript/hybrid app developers — and represented the agency at events like dmexco in Cologne, where we showed off component frameworks and style-guide-driven development. We hosted talks and workshops in our Bonn office (UXBN, Radikant sessions, Perceiving Spaces), contributed to the BVDW guide on social-media success measurement, and occasionally ran things like the Garnier Color Run as Team Ruhmesmeile. It was the classic agency life: tight deadlines, strong opinions about CSS, and a genuine love for doing web work properly.

If Ruhmesmeile was the day job, TSNM was the night job. Enfant terrible, as my Facebook profile put it. I started DJing and producing mixes in the late 2000s, and by 2011 I was running a regular show on DI.fm called No Excuses — a name that stuck. Over the years No Excuses became a long-running mix series, reaching volumes in the mid-30s and spawning specials like tsnm & gRASp present no excuses vol. 20, tsnm meets Metalectro for a 2011 retrospective, and tsnm presents one year no excuses. There were UK-bass Easter specials, future-bass and trap mixes, a Paris/Pitchfork-influenced set, and live streams on Mixlr where I would spin whatever had caught my ear that week.

The genre map shifted constantly: electro, dubstep, UK bass, drum & bass, trap, future beats, instrumental grime, footwork, juke. I played with and alongside people from the Bonn/Cologne scene and beyond, and I was a resident or regular at nights like Klubsport, Lambda Maximal, BONN and BASS, BASSSHIP, and MoNkEyBiZNeSs. I played the closing set at FrOSCon 2012, did the KulturWoche Opening @ N8Schicht in October 2011, and held down the Klubsport Bonn floor at the Maschinenraum Closing in September 2011. Somewhere in there I also lost a bunch of mixes to hard-drive crashes and SoundCloud takedowns — enough that a Russian blog once assembled a TSNM archive of everything they could find, which is honestly the most internet thing that has ever happened to me.

I kept making things: TSNM origins story countdowns in 2015, re-ups of old technoid-electro sets, Bandcamp evangelism, and an ongoing argument with regional licensing that made buying digital music harder than it should be. The mixes changed names and genres, but the through-line was always the same: dig for the good stuff, put it in an order that makes sense, and play it loud.

The archive is dense with club nights. Bonn and Cologne in the 2010s had a ridiculous amount of underground energy: Bootshaus, Odonien, N8Lounge, Tante Rike, Kult 41, Bar Ludwig, Stadtgarten, Gebäude 9, Heinz Gaul, Club Bahnhof Ehrenfeld, Tsunami, Der Goldene Engel, Bassship at Township — the list goes on. I was there for a lot of it, either behind the decks, on the guest list, or in the crowd.

Klubsport was the constant: a Bonn institution for bass music and club culture, and a place where I was both resident and co-conspirator. Lambda Maximal was another home base, with the Outrun-Edition giveaway and a stack of parties tied to the Bonn scene. BONN and BASS brought dubstep and bass nights to the city; BASSSHIP ran the drum & bass / dubstep / liquid nights at Township on the Rhine. There were birthday bashes, open-air parties, Karneval weekends (UGGA AGGA KACKMUSIK at Der Goldene Engel, Rosenmontag at Joey's apartment), Silvester at Heinz Gaul, and more Geburtstagsparty invites than any human should reasonably receive.

Beyond the clubs, the party culture spilled into the city: Street Food Weekend Bonn, Wunderwelt Open Air, Breakzone Festival, GIB DIR BÖS! Open Air with SSIO, Megaloh, Fatoni and friends, Umsonst & Draußen, PIMP MY STRÄNDCHEN, Beats auf Rädern, the Bonn Better Know nights, and the occasional warehouse or riverside rave. Bonn was small enough that the same faces kept showing up, and big enough that there was always a new night to check out.

The archive also tracks the trips. In October/November 2014 I went to Pitchfork Music Festival Paris and filled an entire photo album with it. In May 2016 I was at the Telekom Electronic Beats Festival Köln. I went to c/o pop Festival in 2016, Panama Open Air on the Rheinaue in 2015 and 2016, evoke (the demoparty in Kalk) in 2015, 2016, and 2018, and FrOSCon (the free-software conference) several times, including its 10th-anniversary edition. There were concerts for Massive Attack, DJ Shadow, Flume, Disclosure, Netsky, Oliver Koletzki, Kollektiv Turmstrasse, Clueso, and a lot of smaller club shows that never made it into a festival poster.

I also showed up for the culture around the music: Bundeskunsthalle exhibition openings, FuckUp Nights Cologne, BarCamp Bonn, Webmontag, new talents – biennale cologne, Streetart Clash, the Bonner Schallplattenbörse, Reine Kultur (the DIY successor to Rheinkultur), and the annual RhEINKULTUR festival before it. The archive captures a version of Bonn/Cologne that was constantly making its own fun — part music scene, part tech scene, part just-show-up-and-see-what-happens scene.

If I had to boil the decade down: it was about building things by day and then going out and losing yourself in sound by night. It was TYPO3 deadlines and TYPO3 afterparties. It was relaunching a client's website and then relaunching yourself on the dancefloor. It was a small city with a disproportionately loud electronic music scene, a tight-knit web/design community, and a lot of people who were genuinely excited about both.

The Facebook archive runs from 2008 to 2018, so it captures the whole arc: the early club nights, the DI.fm show, the No Excuses mixes, the agency growing up, the festivals, the relaunches, the birthday parties, the afterparties, and the slow drift from let's see what's happening tonight to remember when we used to go out every weekend? Both of those are true. It was a good decade.