A new wing: the Curiosity Cabinet
The newest work on the bench is The Curiosity Cabinet – a wing of classic problems from computer science, mathematics, and physics, rebuilt as playable exhibits, with mystery case files that train the reasoning this craft actually runs on. The room opened with the primes; the first new exhibits are being built one at a time.
Alongside it, the Transitions build continues – field guides for the forks a software career actually takes – Engineer to Architect, to AI Engineer, to Manager, and to Product Manager. Each shares a shape: the mindset and values that travel with you, a research-grounded skillset map, a role map, and a short quiz to test the fit. The Transitions hub ties them together, and Engineer to Architect is the furthest along.
The AI in Practice guide is now complete – an honest, no-hype map of AI for working engineers, eighteen chapters from first principles to staying current. It stays live and maintained; the focus has moved to the paths above.
Alongside both, The Journal archive keeps growing – essays on craft, leadership, and the long game, now also delivered as a newsletter.
Learn. Excel. Lead.
A media brand and community for engineers – from first job to leadership – built around three phases of a career. Currently under construction: brand, content pipeline, and the first episodes. The chevrons are ready; the cursor is blinking.
This site itself is also a workshop project: hand-built, no framework, and lately growing an interactive self-assessment, dark mode, and a reading-experience layer.
Cloud architecture, by day
Designing compliant, cost-modelled AWS platforms for payments and FinTech – the kind that answer to GDPR, PCI/DSS, and DORA, and to the harder regulator: production. Munich is home base; the work spans borders.
The newest mandate: carrying that architecture discipline into applied GenAI – AI-assisted testing and AI-driven cloud operations on AWS, working through the practical questions of model selection, RAG, and agent pipelines. Early, hands-on, and honest about what works.
New grammars: Go and Python
After twenty-five years of thinking in Java, I am deliberately learning to think in two new languages – Go for its ruthless simplicity, Python for its reach into data. Not to chase a stack; to stay a student.
AI-assisted engineering remains the daily practicum – using agents in real workflows, testing where they genuinely help and where they quietly fail. The findings become essays.
On the reading desk: Pandas Cookbook (putting the Python to work), Co-Intelligence (on thinking with AI), and Thinking in Bets (on deciding well when you cannot be certain).
Claude helped me build this site
Not only the writing about it – the build itself. The structure, the design system, the article catalogue, even the memory behind the scenes were shaped hand in hand with Claude. A few real runs:
The totals keep climbing: well past 140 million tokens across all of it now, with Opus 4.8 doing most of the work. The running tally – sessions, messages, models – lives on Uses.
Three sons, one garden, many books
Raising three boys in Bavaria with Hafsa – which is to say: living inside a five-language household where the children have become the teachers. Reading slowly, in a cosy corner, preferably while it rains.
Somewhere between curiosity and uncertainty lives my career.
This is a now page – a deliberate answer to "what are you up to these days?" It gets re-tended when the season changes, not when the algorithm demands.