Berlin, Germany
About
I'm an engineer in Berlin. I spent four and a half years at TikTok's Berlin office, from April 2021 to September 2025.
The projects on this site all come from the same habit: when a part of my own life got complicated enough to keep dropping things, I built the smallest system that would hold it. A morning briefing that scores news against rubrics instead of a single relevance score. A constraint solver for alpine hut bookings. A deadline registry that renders itself into a single static page with no server behind it.
Building for exactly one known user is a strange constraint and a clarifying one. There is no persona to design against and no roadmap to hide behind — the tool either survives contact with the actual week or it gets deleted. Most of what I would defend in these write-ups comes from that: the failure modes I chose to make loud, the numbers I record instead of a yes/no, the things I deliberately did not automate.
How this site is built
Astro, no analytics, no cookies, deployed as static files. The interactive artifacts are published as the original single HTML files rather than ported into components — they were designed to be downloaded and opened offline, and that property is the point.
Because the source material lives alongside genuinely private records, every build runs a scanner first: a deny-by-default pass over the whole tree that fails the build on booking numbers, identity numbers, credentials and a short list of things that must never be published. Anything legitimately public — a mountain hut's own phone number — is allowlisted individually, with a written reason. The check is wired into the build script itself, so skipping the commit hook doesn't skip the gate.