Toni Nguyen

Hi, I’m Toni. I’m 22, I live in Leipzig, and I’m studying computer science at HTWK until April 2027.

Sneakers got me into this, which is not the usual answer. I started reselling as a teenager, and that world runs on software: monitors watching for restocks, checkout scripts, everything decided inside a few hundred milliseconds. The people winning were the ones who could automate. I wanted to build those tools and had no idea how. For years the ideas were there and the skills weren’t. Studying closed that gap, and I haven’t stopped automating since.

The clearest proof sits in my parents’ Vietnamese takeaway in Leipzig-Stötteritz. Orders used to arrive one phone call at a time, written on paper in the middle of a busy kitchen. Today they run through a system I designed, built and still maintain. Customers pick a dish and a pickup slot online, the kitchen works from one queue instead of a pile of notes, and a Raspberry Pi on site prints the receipt. Login runs over SMS one-time codes. GDPR and GoBD are handled properly, because a real business has to survive real rules. It runs every day the shop is open, and when it breaks, fixing it is my job. Right now I’m adding a loyalty programme.

Alongside my studies I work as a working student at ALVARA, on a multi-tenant back-office system that retail companies in several countries use to run their branches. TypeScript, Vue on the front end, NestJS behind it. Two things fill most of my week: driving changes through an AI-assisted workflow and then verifying what comes back out of it, and debugging across tenant environments, which usually means turning a vague bug report into a root cause somewhere down in the database.

I started there as an intern, writing an end-to-end test suite for a cash-management application: 96 test cases across 38 suites. The tests were not the interesting part. What kept breaking them was. Hand-written selectors are the usual reason UI tests turn flaky, so I built a tool called Scout that reads the live DOM and generates verified, version-controlled selectors instead, 309 of them across 71 routes and six sites. Fixing the cause instead of the symptom is still the work I’m proudest of.

Most of my own projects start because something near me is tedious. Zwo is a Flutter app for two people sharing a household: shared shopping list, shared calendar, and a running tally of who paid for what, synced between both phones. Spari finds the lowest price something can actually be bought for, stacking cashback, student discounts and coupon codes into one number. Before those came a tracker that watched Pokémon restocks branch by branch, and a scanner for friends who scout youth football, because finding the right tournaments used to cost them entire evenings.

I want to make a living from what I build. Demos are easy. The things I care about are the ones that survive contact with real users and a kitchen at dinner rush.

Away from a screen, food comes first. That is what happens when you grow up between a wok and a delivery counter. I play basketball and table tennis, badly enough to keep it fun. And sneakers never stopped being the thing that started all of this.

Working student in Leipzig, available full-time from April 2027. On-site, hybrid or remote.