Short notes from competitions, a road trip to the Arctic, two startups and the Red Cross. Each one dated to when it was written, close to the event.
, 2 min read
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 during the term.
machine-learning, web, learning, university
Read the postIn 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.
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.
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.
A pitch to investors, the result as announced to the teams, and two weeks in Pennsylvania as date lines.
Week two: an elimination that turned into a revenue ranking, a pitch round down to five teams, and people giving away their day off.
Through the first elimination, users who look past the bugs, and the sentence that took my engineering reflex apart.
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.
A call from René, twenty minutes to decide, Tenerife cancelled and one week of building before the flight to New York.
At the OpenAI hackathon at IdeaLab! in Vallendar I coordinated parallel AI coding agents. We didn't win, but the MVP is live.
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.
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.
Since January I've been working on Julia, the AI receptionist by MitJulia (formerly Friseurtelefon). A progress report with numbers.
Since February I've been organising startup tours at HPI Engine. What worked in Munich and what Amsterdam taught me about cold outreach.
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.
For a seminar on statistical fallacies I built a synthetic trading dataset with three hidden biases. Plus a talk on hallucination in language models.
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.
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.
As an sdw scholar I led the school outreach for our regional group's social day. On July 1 it happened.
We won the AWS World Sports Innovation Cup 2026 with the Connected Arena challenge, and I pitched in the final.
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.
Straight from the road trip to START Hack: 36 hours on an AI-guided thesis journey for Studyond.
Two office visits, one product decision, and 17 days that end with cleaning a van.
Why we skipped the North Cape and what we got instead.
Exams done, a van from the startup, a laptop on the passenger seat: week one of our travel-and-code road trip.
I've volunteered with the German Red Cross in Potsdam since October 2024. This winter it was a major fire and black ice.
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.
In the Software Architecture course a team of seven built a real-time strategy game in Squeak/Smalltalk. My part: hand, cards and elixir.
At the Siemens × AWS hackathon in Berlin I built real-time trash detection, and our team took first place.
Building a chatbot app for the Bundesliga with Hasso's Kickers at the first Bundesliga Hackathon by DFL, AWS and EintrachtTech.
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.
We won Best Pitch at HPI Engine's E-Challenge with an idea against fake news. A week later I started building it.
80 places a year, a selection process with an aptitude test, and a decision against some big names.
Seventh place at the German championships in my hometown, six days before my Abitur certificate.
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.
