iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

philip @heltweg.org · 28/09/2026

Finally going to complete the programmer rite-of-passage of creating my own todolist app 🧘‍♂️.

philip @heltweg.org · 25/09/2026

J'organise une partie de D&D en présentiel à Paris, destinée aux personnes qui apprennent une langue et souhaitent pratiquer le français ou l'anglais. Nous associons les langues du jeu à des langues réelles et pratiquons la conversation tout en jouant :). Si cela vous intéresse, suivez ce lien : 🧵 ⬇️

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philip @heltweg.org · 25/09/2026

I am hosting a D&D game, in-person in Paris for language learners that want to practice speaking French or English. We map ingame languages to real-world languages and practice speaking while playing :). If that interests you, have a look/leave your email here: girafe.co/pin/practic...

girafe.co

Practice languages with role-playing games / Pratiquer les langues grâce aux jeux de rôle - Girafe

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philip @heltweg.org · 24/09/2026

Took a moment to generate a new favicon for my personal homepage. It's just my initials rendered from my custom font (my handwriting). Kind of basic, but I like it, gives it a personal touch :).

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philip @heltweg.org · 10/09/2026

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...

heltweg.org

On Immigration and Civility | Philip Heltweg

A personal reflection.

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philip @heltweg.org · 08/09/2026

"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".

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philip @heltweg.org · 01/09/2026

The wonders of open data, for french transport data search for "French national access point to transport data" :) #opendata #dataengineering #DataBS

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philip @heltweg.org · 31/08/2026

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 :).

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philip @heltweg.org · 27/08/2026

Cool fonts from the internet: DEPARTURE MONO, for some low-fi tech vibes :) #fonts #webdesign #paris

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philip @heltweg.org · 25/08/2026

I am back to publishing whimsical software development until bsky is a place I would like to spend time on. Building a delightful website to follow parisian public transport. Sounds yes? Sounds no? #paris #metro #ratp #sncf #buildinpublic #opendata

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philip @heltweg.org · 21/08/2026

Can't stop, won't stop, look at this cute station board 🚋 😅.

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philip @heltweg.org · 21/08/2026

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 🤩 .

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philip @heltweg.org · 20/08/2026

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?

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philip @heltweg.org · 11/08/2026

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...

pivotal.substack.com

Looks, Brains, and Money

Finance doesn’t use AI enough. Data quality is the answer. Here’s how.

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philip @heltweg.org · 10/08/2026

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...

heltweg.org

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.

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philip @heltweg.org · 09/08/2026

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 🤩.

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philip @heltweg.org · 07/08/2026

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 :).

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Reposted by philip

ceej @ceej.online · 31/07/2026

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

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philip @heltweg.org · 05/08/2026

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...

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philip @heltweg.org · 01/08/2026

Wow, I see LinkedIn is going with the times and allows you to report AI slip now 👀.

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philip @heltweg.org · 31/07/2026

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 😅.)

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philip @heltweg.org · 25/07/2026

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?

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philip @heltweg.org · 24/07/2026

What the fuck is this, the US and venture capital truly are a threat to the world www.youtube.com/shorts/iOeW....

youtube.com

The Future of American Defense

Warfare is at an inflection point, and the old ways of Army acquisi...

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philip @heltweg.org · 24/07/2026

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 😅.

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philip @heltweg.org · 22/07/2026

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

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philip @heltweg.org · 21/07/2026

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 🙈 .

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philip @heltweg.org · 15/07/2026

embarrassing game, sad that there can't be two losers :(

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philip @heltweg.org · 13/07/2026

In my "post-pictures-of-starbucks"-era. But with that rare version of my name I had to :).

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philip @heltweg.org · 04/07/2026

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.

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philip @heltweg.org · 29/06/2026

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?

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philip @heltweg.org · 26/06/2026

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? 😬

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philip @heltweg.org · 26/06/2026

@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 :)

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philip @heltweg.org · 22/06/2026

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 ✨ .

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philip @heltweg.org · 22/06/2026

Looking forward to a beautiful evening 🥰

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philip @heltweg.org · 19/06/2026

We're still going strong reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications, now on chapter 4, storage & retrieval. It starts by introducing the world's simplest database: #!/bin/bash db_set () { echo "$1,$2" >> database } db_get () { grep "^$1," database | sed -e "s/^$1,//" | tail -n 1 } 🧵

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philip @heltweg.org · 19/06/2026

Something tells me I might be in an AB test group for our TV app 🤔

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philip @heltweg.org · 18/06/2026

Top two wishes for AI in my life: Trello/fastmail/gcal learning that "tomorrow morning" means 10 am, not what they decide and my autocorrect learning my lastname is Heltweg not Hellwig. I know these are complex problems and they only have 10 years of training data on me, but a guy can dream.

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philip @heltweg.org · 12/06/2026

Feels great to be adding customer reviews to the website again 🥰. It's like collecting a Pokemon, I want to catch them all 😅.

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philip @heltweg.org · 12/06/2026

I love that I can have emails in my regular inbox that are both auto-labeled as spam and manually blocked. Don't let others tell you what to do Fastmail client, live your own life ✨.

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philip @heltweg.org · 05/06/2026

girafe (girafe.co) is an interesting project aiming to create interdisciplinary collaboration and connections. I love that girafe sees itself as a civic tool and wants to work with the local infrastructure. I've helped with feedback on first tech hires. Fun work, if you need something similar 🤙 .

girafe.co

Girafe | Trouvez des projets, présentez vos talents et grandissez à Paris

Exposez votre talent sur Girafe. Trouvez des projets collaboratifs et profils qui transforment Paris et le monde. Créez, connectez, grandissez!

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philip @heltweg.org · 04/06/2026

Adding low-pressure talking scenarios to my #french learning game and going until the free AI model goes insane. Record so far: Two responses 💪 .

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philip @heltweg.org · 01/06/2026

today I've heard a social science person describe themselves as a soft boy and I love that for him 🥹

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philip @heltweg.org · 30/05/2026

Being forced to agree to have your data sold to third-party companies to be spammed with ads to buy a ticket to the Esports World Cup is wild. Shame.

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philip @heltweg.org · 29/05/2026

"I use AI to improve my writing!", my friend, i want to dig into your face, searching the wires, tearing and ripping until i find the human underneath

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philip @heltweg.org · 29/05/2026

This week kicks of reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications with chapter 1 on tradeoffs. It references a DataOps Manifesto. Coming from the world of agile SE(with the agile manifesto/12 factor apps) I was disappointed that it seems like a corporate marketing page :( 🧵⬇️ #dataBS

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philip @heltweg.org · 29/05/2026

i finally got my pebble watch and the first thing it does is be angry at me 😭 shh, no rest for the wicked my tiny friend

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philip @heltweg.org · 28/05/2026

Very niche question, but: How are the French equivalents to these slow "slice of normal life" documentaries in German national television called, e.g. something like Nordstory, SWR Landesschau etc? Feels like those would be great for low-effort French hearing 😅 www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKU...

youtube.com

Duftende Brötchen & ne große Baustelle | Die Nordreportage | NDR | Kurzfassung

Der Dorfladen im mecklenburgischen Bernitt ist zu klein geworden. E...

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philip @heltweg.org · 28/05/2026

J'ai venu ecrire "petite réussi du jour", mais Google me dit "petit succès de la journée" 😅. Bah, on essaye 😭.

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philip @heltweg.org · 26/05/2026

It's time for my final (?) blogpost about improving techdocs for yourself or your AI agent, based on our prototyping of an agentic knowledge-base: This time on classifying pages , creating embeddings and building a graph based on explicit and semantic links. www.heltweg.org/posts/impro... #dataBS

heltweg.org

Improving Local Techdocs for Your AI Coding Agent | Philip Heltweg

After crawling and cleaning technical documentation locally, we add page classification, embeddings, and a knowledge graph to make the data much more useful for AI coding agents.

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