Blog · 2024 to 2026 · 35 posts
Notes from the road.
Look-backs on competitions, trips and startup work, one post per event. Each one says when it was written.
- Interim update, written during the term. Deep learning without the exam: why I rebuilt the course book as a website This term I'm sitting in on the Deep Learning lecture at HPI. To really understand the material, I rewrote the first part of the course book as a simplified German study site with interactive demos.
- Interim update, written shortly after the first interim review. An agentic system with BMW: the code calculates, the model explains In the seminar Building Agentic Products we're working with BMW on a system that spots early warning signs of unplanned machine stops. An interim update, as abstract as confidentiality requires.
- Interim update, written in the project's first month. GorillaScout: getting into a pipeline that four cohorts built before us Since October I've been in the bachelor's project that re-identifies wild gorillas in camera-trap video. An interim update on how you get into a pipeline that four cohorts built before you.
- Looking back, written a few days after my last Kobe commit. Kobe: what I actually built as founding engineer The Launchpad series tells the three weeks from the inside. This post explains the product: an agent that finds the best path to a person through your own network, and my part in it.
- Looking back, written the day after demo day. Part 5 of 5 of the Launchpad series. Launchpad, part 5: Demo day A pitch to investors, the result as announced to the teams, and two weeks in Pennsylvania as date lines.
- Looking back, written the evening before demo day. Part 4 of 5 of the Launchpad series. Launchpad, part 4: Revenue, not points Week two: an elimination that turned into a revenue ranking, a pitch round down to five teams, and people giving away their day off.
- Looking back, written at the end of our first week at camp. Part 3 of 5 of the Launchpad series. Launchpad, part 3: Ten interviews, completely useless Through the first elimination, users who look past the bugs, and the sentence that took my engineering reflex apart.
- Looking back, written on the morning of the first elimination day. Part 2 of 5 of the Launchpad series. Launchpad, part 2: "Your system has run out of application memory" New York, a bus from Times Square, a camp in the woods and two nights in which first the laptops and then we hit our limits.
- Looking back, written on the day we flew to New York. Part 1 of 5 of the Launchpad series. Launchpad, part 1: Seven days before A call from René, twenty minutes to decide, Tenerife cancelled and one week of building before the flight to New York.
- Looking back, written the day after the hackathon. Voya: 48 hours, more than 50 worktrees, no prize At the OpenAI hackathon at IdeaLab! in Vallendar I coordinated parallel AI coding agents. We didn't win, but the MVP is live.
- Looking back, dated to the day of the last commit. MediaSync: photos from your phone to a USB stick, no cloud For half a year I built an Android app on the side that backs up photos and videos straight to a USB stick. About 26,000 lines of Kotlin, on my own.
- Looking back, dated two days after the last commit. A website for takeøff in five days, with a night sky and no tracking Our cultural collective in Potsdam needed a website. I built it in five days, bilingual, with my own Canvas scene engine and a data layer that can take a database later.
- Looking back, written after closing the timeout and alerting tickets in early September. Eight months at MitJulia: what you learn when an AI answers the phone for hair salons Since January I've been working on Julia, the AI receptionist by MitJulia (formerly Friseurtelefon). A progress report with numbers.
- Looking back, written after the feedback meeting on both tours. Organising startup tours: Munich, Amsterdam and zero replies Since February I've been organising startup tours at HPI Engine. What worked in Munich and what Amsterdam taught me about cold outreach.
- Looking back, dated two days after the last commit. ¡Vamos!: a Spanish app in two days, offline and without an account My school Spanish is B1 and getting rusty. So I built myself a small learning app that runs in the browser, works offline and doesn't ask you to sign up.
- Looking back, dated to the end of the summer term. The grade is added as a note at the end. Project Midas: a fund that looks too good, and three mistakes inside it For a seminar on statistical fallacies I built a synthetic trading dataset with three hidden biases. Plus a talk on hallucination in language models.
- Looking back, dated three days after the code defense. The grade is added as a note at the end. PowerSqueak: seven-year-old code, nine sprints and a bug in the event routing In the Software Engineering course we took over an old presentation tool written in Smalltalk and kept building it. My features: slide sections and a presentation timer.
- Looking back, dated three days after the final presentation. The grade is added as a note at the end. ESN Event Hub: six tools, one event and why we built it boring For the Erasmus Student Network in Potsdam we mapped the event process, modelled it and shipped a small web app as a team. Understand first, then build.
- Looking back, written two days after the school day. A school day for 87 eleventh-graders, and how it got there As an sdw scholar I led the school outreach for our regional group's social day. On July 1 it happened.
- Looking back, written a few days after the final at the DFB campus. AWS World Sports Innovation Cup: research first, then build, then Frankfurt We won the AWS World Sports Innovation Cup 2026 with the Connected Arena challenge, and I pitched in the final.
- Looking back, dated two days after the last commit. Five people, one trip to Sicily and a planning tool in twelve days Instead of a spreadsheet and three group chats I built our travel group a small planning site with votes, a budget and a day plan.
- Looking back, written the day after the trip home from St. Gallen. START Hack in St. Gallen: no prize, a good prototype Straight from the road trip to START Hack: 36 hours on an AI-guided thesis journey for Studyond.
- Looking back, written the day after we got home. Arctic Sprint, part 3: Lovable, Soundboks and back in Berlin at 4 am Two office visits, one product decision, and 17 days that end with cleaning a van.
- Looking back, written on the way south from the Lofoten islands. Arctic Sprint, part 2: Arctic Circle, northern lights, Lofoten in a storm Why we skipped the North Cape and what we got instead.
- Looking back, written on the way north out of Helsinki. Arctic Sprint, part 1: by van from Berlin to Helsinki Exams done, a van from the startup, a laptop on the passenger seat: week one of our travel-and-code road trip.
- Looking back, written in late February 2026 after the black ice deployment. Red Cross medic in civil protection, next to a full semester I've volunteered with the German Red Cross in Potsdam since October 2024. This winter it was a major fire and black ice.
- Looking back, dated to the end of the term, just before the road trip. 800 runs of dig: what one semester of internet measurement taught me In the English-language course Introduction to Internet Measurements I designed, ran and analysed a measurement every week. The last one was my own RIPE Atlas study.
- Looking back, dated two days after the hand-in. The grade is added as a note at the end. TouchdownTactics: seven people, one game in Smalltalk, and I had the cards In the Software Architecture course a team of seven built a real-time strategy game in Squeak/Smalltalk. My part: hand, cards and elixir.
- Looking back, written a few days after the hackathon. ReThink Recycling: live trash detection without a GPU At the Siemens × AWS hackathon in Berlin I built real-time trash detection, and our team took first place.
- Looking back, written a few days after the final in Frankfurt. Bundesliga Hackathon: three days, 71 commits, one of the winning teams Building a chatbot app for the Bundesliga with Hasso's Kickers at the first Bundesliga Hackathon by DFL, AWS and EintrachtTech.
- Looking back, dated a few days after the last commit. OweFlow: 120 commits, then the question about money A fellow student and I spent a month building a Flutter app that splits group expenses. What stopped us wasn't the code but payment regulation.
- Looking back, dated to the end of the prototype week. Ratard: from a one-minute pitch to a browser extension in a week We won Best Pitch at HPI Engine's E-Challenge with an idea against fake news. A week later I started building it.
- Looking back, written in my first week of lectures. First week at HPI: why I picked the small one 80 places a year, a selection process with an aptitude test, and a decision against some big names.
- Looking back, written the day after the German championships in Erfurt. Karate since childhood and a national championship before my school certificate Seventh place at the German championships in my hometown, six days before my Abitur certificate.
- Looking back, written a few days after the national final in Heilbronn. PneuNet: eighteen months of chest X-rays, three competition rounds How a school research project on pneumonia detection made it to the national final of Jugend forscht, and why the DICOM viewer is the real product in the end.
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