That isn‘t the whole truth, however. I built a static html website and hosted it on some free hosting service, and added a few posts that were no longer than a tweet. No metrics on viewership and no consistency on content, it was mostly nonsense. I had no reason for making this besides a common dream shared by 14-year olds: to be famous. But certainly not to connect with people wishing to talk about shared interests.

Thankfully, with more than a decade of experience in nonsense, I am able to more consistently write. This time as both a mental exercise and a way to share with and seek out those of you who are interested in what I‘m saying.

I do have a strict goal, which is part of the “mental exercise” above, to write each blog post exclusively by my own hand. Not a single word contributed by artificial generation. I work at a startup which revolves around data engineering, one of the most heavily LLM saturated fields in the world right now. I have tested limits of what LLMs are able to do, I have had it generate me content, I have observed from an office chair as it constructs entire applications. But after it all, I always feel prouder writing, designing, or creating something in the more traditional or analog way.

Just to get started, here are some of my heavy professional and personal interests. I’ll try to mix up my discussions so that I’m not leaning too heavily into one field. I’m not an expert in any of these, so I don’t want to sound like one and have a blog dedicated to one thing. It’s a deliberate choice to do this, I just want to write about things that interest me!

Starting off is Credit Cards. Those of you who know me personally must have heard me talk about credit cards before. And if you haven’t, then you must not live in the United States. I found great interest in almost everything there is to do with credit cards, most notably their rewards and bonuses. But credit cards can also have really cool designs, be made out of different materials, and have really weird reward structures that are more of a puzzle than a reward. I am not super interested in travel-hacking, although some people associate this with credit cards, but I do align with travel hackers on maximizing points.

I have been working on creditcard.cafe for 3 years now. It started off as an idea, which became a really crude web app with a credit card database. That was the original name, btw, Credit Card Database, or CCDB. Some of the code still references this. I have been building it in segments of 2 week sprints every now and then, and it’s something I am really proud to show off. Along the way, I have improved my web design abilities greatly, including UI/UX and javascript. Credit Card Cafe is my biggest and longest running passion projects / hobbies I have ever had.

This project is also what inspired me to pursue a Masters in Business Administration, and I was able to find a program in Berlin which focused on Startups and Startup management. It became obvious that my career would be focused around startups, they have such a fascinating nature to them. While studying in Berlin, which happens to be a city concentrated in startups, I was fortunate to join dltHub as a working student on their GTM (Go-To-Market) team. My position here is the bullseye of my career plan, as I get to use my programming experience, apply my business fundamentals from my MBA lectures, and understand the nature of a startup from within.

So yes, I would love to discuss all these interests of mine: Credit Cards, Credit Card Cafe, my MBA program, Startups and Startup Culture, and share some interesting things from my personal and progressional life. I look forward to learning more, not just from my own studies and experiences, but also from readers!