During the first years I was the project scientist for the ALFA project, an experimental adaptive optics (AO) system on the 3.5m telescope on Calar Alto, Spain. Scientifically I was mostly concerned with the formation of massive stars. The interest in AO persisted, and I became more and more involved in instrumentation projects, primarily along the tracks of pyramid wavefront sensors and extreme adaptive optics. Today I am the German Co-I of the METIS project (see below).