Practical tasks that Benni works on include business coordination and management, backend development, server setup + maintenance, and plenty of coding.
Benni uses some key terms when he thinks about his leadership role at the agency and helping clients:
- “Taking the hits” - Frontline coordination of clients and client projects
- “Think” - find the best ideas on how to solve technical issues
- “Listen, Translate” - Turning client needs and requests into useful development tasks
- “Dig deep” - Analyzing hard-to-fix issues, looking for their source and solutions
- “Engage, Encourage, Unblock” - Finding the right, constructive next steps for any and all development- or ‘human’ issues that arise in the course of our activities
Tools Benni can’t live without:
- TYPO3
Though b13 co-founder and TYPO3 CMS Core Development Lead, Benni Mack, is something of an unstructured genius, he gives us the structure we need to succeed in many areas. He’s part of coordinating the business side of our agency and winning new clients. He handles setup and maintenance of our technical infrastructure. And though he’s one of our key resources when we’re solving new problems for clients, he uses a classic “salami tactic” when he can get away with it: Any problem you bring to him, he slices into even finer pieces and gives it back to you. Watch out for leaving with more questions than you came with! Little-known facts about Benni: he was a German national semi-finalist in Olympic Greco-Roman-style wrestling and he can’t swim.
Expertise
- Ansible, Apple, Blackfire, Cloudflare, database, PHP, PSRs, SQL
- TYPO3, v10, core, custom, extensions, workspaces
- Caching, CDN, CI-deployment, regular expressions, web servers
- Contribution, community, enablement, sharing knowledge
- Delivering value, exceptional experiences, international, multilingual, partnership
- Family, listening, learning, sharing, teamwork, trust
Benni and TYPO3
Benni on working at b13
Benni’s Dos and Don’ts
- Always understand, build things to last, and maximize your efficiency
- Always ask for the reason and the need before doing something (“understand”)
- Always find a clean, future-proof solution that keeps you out of trouble in the future (“build things to last”)
- Always automate (“be efficient, don’t do the same thing three times”)
- Always be optimistic and see the benefits of bad situations, look for the silver lining
- Always look for a long-term solution or strategy
- Never give up!
- Never blame others!
- Never waste your time!
Latest articles by Benni Mack
More efficient menus for TYPO3
Before you buy more server space to speed up a slow-loading TYPO3 site, there might be another solution. Transitioning from TYPO3’s native menu to b13’s menus extension can significantly improve your site’s loading speed and allow more simultaneous users, while reducing the load on your servers.
Consistent UX makes selecting items more intuitive
Previously in this series, we covered the improvements TYPO3 v11 brought to the Page Tree in the post, Resizable Navigation Area in TYPO3. There is one feature in particular that deserves its own shiny spot in our list of new features in TYPO3 v11, and that is the tree functionality within the Element Browser and the Link Picker.
TYPO3, a CMS without borders
TYPO3 is an open source CMS used widely across Europe, but it is still surprisingly little known in some regions. Built for international, multiregional, distributed, and multilingual organizations, TYPO3 is an accessible CMS for users around the world. In this article, we’ll walk you through the strengths of this CMS and why you should consider it alongside other popular solutions like Sitecore, Drupal, and WordPress.
How CDNs and TYPO3 offer Superior Speed, Uptime, and User Experience
Today’s world is global, and content distribution networks (CDNs) bring content closer to users around the world for lightning-fast performance wherever they are. TYPO3 is ideally adapted to modern CDN technology, reducing the load on your server, and even taking caching off your to-do list!