philip
@heltweg.org
Freelance Technical Product Manager & Engineer · PhD Computer Science · Founder at isselthal industries | Visit https://heltweg.org & https://isselthal.industries/ :)
In Feb 2025 I wrote "On Immigration and Civility" to deal with the feeling of anxiety I had with the upcoming general election and the right-wing AfD in Germany. It is still one of my writings I am most proud of and, sadly, now is probably a good time to share it again: heltweg.org/posts/immig...
On Immigration and Civility | Philip Heltweg
A personal reflection.
heltweg.org
"oh no, how ever could we make the sure the children are save", I say while throwing more and more babies into the baby grinding machine. "please, how ever could we stop", I ask while grabbing the next ankle and tossing, "oh no, oh the humanities, if only there was a way to stop".
The wonders of open data, for french transport data search for "French national access point to transport data" :) #opendata #dataengineering #DataBS
I visited #SotM2026 in Paris over the weekend! :D It was nice to learn more about the tech behind open street map, the mapping community and how the data is used and created. Very similar vibes to the open source community at e.g. FOSDEM. Hopefully I can work more with open data in the future :).
Cool fonts from the internet: DEPARTURE MONO, for some low-fi tech vibes :) #fonts #webdesign #paris
As a fun project to end to the week, I played around with French open data for Parisian public transport, plus experimented with sound design (so you will need to enable sound!). Still quite iffy train positions sometimes, but I love how it looks 🤩 .
I am going to start an in-person D&D group (in Paris) as a way to learn and practice French 😱. Base language will be English, we map in-game languages to real languages and play in a melting pot of cultures so everyone can practice while playing :). Do I know anyone who would be interested to join?
Quick share: Niche audience from the outside (financial professionals working with AI), but both the post as well as the author in general are worth reading if you are interested in high-quality essays about data: substack.com/home/post/p...
Looks, Brains, and Money
Finance doesn’t use AI enough. Data quality is the answer. Here’s how.
pivotal.substack.com
More than half of 2026 is over (😱), so it is a great time for a look back on plans and what actually happened for my independent work :). It is honest, so maybe boring (?), but exactly the kind of real #buildinpublic content I would like to read (+ there is a graph!): www.heltweg.org/posts/evolv...
Evolving Plans - Looking Back on the First Half of 2026 | Philip Heltweg
A look back at our initial 2026 plan, what changed while building isselthal industries, income and expenses for the start of 2026, and why we now focus on agency work.
heltweg.org
Our arrondissement has moved permanent plots for plants into the street, plus kept the wooden exterior extensions for some restaurants. It's paying off so well, look at how beautiful this is 🤩.
Getting WanderStories ready for another alpha test on the weekend (with semi strangers 😱). Was fun to replace all the AI generated images with my own/public domain art, looks much nicer. Also, WanderStories is (unsurprisingly) already taken as a name, so I am taking suggestions for a new one :).
ANTHROPIC: Our son loves humanity and for the low price of trillions and trillions of dollars will usher in an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity! OPENAI: Our horrible oafish son is hacking web sites without our permission. ANTHROPIC: (eyes narrowing) Our son is also evil
This July, I attended my first ever graduation ceremony 😱. It was a lot of fun! Plus, I wrote a short post about my way to a PhD, and the struggles of being intimidated by university, coming from a "working-class family". www.heltweg.org/posts/compl...
Wow, I see LinkedIn is going with the times and allows you to report AI slip now 👀.
Man, I love progressive web apps. First, you have some "meh" early website prototype, but then you add all the icons, manifests and offline support and it looks/feels so sleek 🤩. (From WanderStories, the treasure hunt/exploration "app" we're building. Friday is build-a-product time 😅.)
Hard at work, testing the first version of our app to explore cities while solving puzzles and treasure hunts. The startup live is challenging, but I am committed to the grind. The first puzzle for you is: Can you guess where this is?
What the fuck is this, the US and venture capital truly are a threat to the world www.youtube.com/shorts/iOeW....
The Future of American Defense
Warfare is at an inflection point, and the old ways of Army acquisi...
youtube.com
A fun post to close the week: I made it back to the Backfabrik in Berlin! I used to work here ~15 years ago (!) at StudiVZ (the German Facebook clone) as an apprentice "mathematical-technical software engineer". Good times. The building and me have survived, sadly (?) StudiVZ has not 😅.
Back to writing blogs, this time about our recent work on measuring quality of AI responses for small startups (i.e. using MD files and a tiny, custom pipeline instead of tools like Langfuse). Have you done something similar? Any good approaches for small scopes? 🧵 #dataBS
Recently, I was allowed to give a lecture on reasons adopt microservices 🙌 . Somehow I made it through most of my PhD teaching without entering a classroom (hint: it's COVID), so it was nice to be in person. P.S: The text behind me on the blackboard is HATEOAS; I had to look it up 🙈 .
In my "post-pictures-of-starbucks"-era. But with that rare version of my name I had to :).
Another wish for the coming AI age: Smart suggestions to continue watching on Netflix. So far I've watched S6:E1, S6:E2, S6:E3, S6:E4 and started S6:E5. Maybe with this amazing new technology one day we can figure out that I want to continue S6:E5 instead of starting S1:E1.
Wow, my GitHub premium expired, and GitHub sent me 20 alarmist emails about how that would remove access to Copilot (which I never use)... and then just quietly 404ed all my GitHub pages (that they know I use). Technically my fault of course, but come on, wtf?
Anyone knows of any expat health insurance (not travel insurance) that is somewhat competent and can be bought for a few months, hopefully largely online? 😬
@casparwre.de Hi, I saw your post on QRpage. Would you mind sharing how you are monitoring common searches by users to find these tiny projects? Would be really interesting to me :)
I was at Vivatech in Paris last week and could capture this beautiful startup visual: A group of visitors impressed by an "autonomous" robot and the startup employee secretly controlling it ✨ .
