Now
Living
Living in a small town in Brandenburg after many years in Berlin. We're slowly renovating an 90-year-old house which had exciting original features like Third Reich windows and a DDR-era electrical system. The big construction stuff is finished, some of the making it look nice is done, and the garden looks less like a prarie.
Working
I'm the CTO of a startup, building end-to-end digital workflows - and in Germany, that's a rarity. It's much more hands-on coding than recent roles have been, but with the current generation of AI tooling, that's actually well within my comfort zone.
Reading
The Kindle backlog isn’t getting any smaller, because I haven’t been commuting since the Before Covid Times. I’m trying to add more German language into the mix, but it’s a balance between things that are too-far beyond my comprehension level which get me lost, or things which are easy to read but not well-written. The first 3 entries in the “most recent” list: Shop Class As Soulcraft; The Origins Of Efficiency; Poets of Matter
Watching
Silo - I would never have looked twice at this if I’d seen the „dystopian“ label, but I’m glad I did. The setting reminds me very strongly of Romania.
Your Friends And Neighbours: horrible empty husks of rich people being horrible.
Listening
I tried Apple Music as an alternative to Spotify for a while, but it didn't stick. My Spotify auto-generated weekly playlist changes so much from week to week bu it's more-or-less impossible to summarise, but there's a lot of Bach in there at the moment. It's maths set to music, which appeals to my inner nerd.
Coding
The various side projects of the last few years are still running, so I have a huge list of dusty half-completed ideas lingering on GitHub.
The joy of a new old house is the chance to try to automate it all by retrofitting new technology to resolutely-analogue systems, so there's a pile of ESP boards and various sensors on one end of my desk. And I’m still trying to figure out the best stack and processes and workflow for keeping this site more up to date.
Building
I inherited a workshop in the cellar of the house which I've slowly kitted out into a small-scale model engineering shop. There's a lathe, mill, four walls-worth of hand tools, and a Big Project underway. That mostly involves making a tool to make a thing to hold another thing to make a tool to make the thing that you actually want to make.