Volker is a proponent of open source. His career started within the geospatial open source world, where he still feels home. GeoCouch, the geospatial extension for Apache CouchDB, which later become also a part of Couchbase, is one of his creations. Two years ago he started together with Damien Katz a new project called Noise. It's an embedded search library which can be used for full-text, range and geospatial queries. In parts of his free time he also contributes to various open source projects, whenever he finds a bug. Those include, RocksDB, Rust, Debian packages, Rockbox and many more.