The AI in Practice series
An honest, no-hype guide to AI for working engineers – eleven essays so far and growing. The conversation about AI in software is full of people with something to sell; this series exists because engineers carrying real delivery responsibility deserve better. Start at The Honest AI Guide.
Alongside it, the Field Notes 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).
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.