I'm sitting on the train to Åkersberga, my childhood neighborhood. I'm going to celebrate Easter at my sister's place and am really looking forward to it!
I appreciate these family gatherings more and more each year. Perhaps it's because someone increasingly seems to manage to get themselves on the guest list of life: Death. With each passing year, the probability increases that the Grim Reaper might crash the party.
It's not something I consciously dwell on, and while I'm not afraid of death, the realization of life's fragility becomes clearer as I get older. This, in turn, leads to stronger bonds and a deeper love for those who are still with us.
In a way, the awareness of passing away serves as a catalyst for bringing us closer together.
Thinking about AGI. The big step that is missing is personal AI being able to learn when it answers a question. So if I use deep research and my AI goes off and spends 10 minutes researching an answer, all of that should be fed back into the model for later.
If you’re a regular visitor of this blog, you might have noticed that my post frequency on here dropped quite a bit since starting uni. And even more so since the start of the new year.
But a lot has happened and changed meanwhile, so that’s what I want to talk about in this post. Let’s get you up to speed, shall we?
Uni: Exam season
The whole month of January and the initial part of February was mostly dominated by my first uni exam season. I had a total of four exams, two of them took place in January and were comparatively easy to prepare for (one in social sciences and one in computer science). The other two were in maths – namely linear algebra 1 and analysis 1. And they weren’t easy at all.
I was always someone who did pretty well in exam situations without needing too much preparation thus far in my career. Oh boy was it different this time…
Since we had to hand in exercises every week throughout the semester, I was already pretty deep into the material by the time January rolled around. Still, I have never invested more time in an exam than I did for the two math ones. So the entire month essentially consisted of trying to understand the syllabus more deeply with the help of many YouTube videos, lots of googling around and trying to use Claude as my personal tutor[1]. I also used RemNote for memorizing all the theorems and proofs we had to know by heart, and set out to solve as many mock exams as I could.
In the end, I wasn’t able to achieve that pre-exam confidence that I was used to, which was unfamiliar (but since it was a uni exam, also to be expected). I also knew that I had done everything in my power to prepare myself, though.
The results proved that all of this effort was time and energy spent well: I passed all four of my exams with a grade between 4.5 and 5.5 (4 means passed, 6 is the best grade). And because I invested so much, the feeling afterward was even more rewarding :)
The only downside was that just one week after the final exam, uni started again. Kind of a bummer, but it makes me look forward to the 3-month summer break even more.
Work: A big project
Work was also quite busy these past few weeks. Our agency took on the biggest project we ever had to handle: A complete redesign of the website of one of the biggest baby food manufacturers here in Switzerland. In the past, we mostly worked with tech startups or small to medium-sized companies that weren’t that widely known. But this brand was immediately recognized by everyone in my social circle who had ever had a baby, which was cool to see.
Luckily, the client was very pleasant to work with, and the project went as smooth as we could expect. The only source of stress in the end was our tight timeline. And the fact that we, alongside the development of the new website, also launched a community forum as well. Fully built with Webflow and Wized (and a surprisingly small amount of custom code).
All in all, a very cool project and I learned a ton of new stuff!
Personal: Moving out
Now onto what was probably the most significant change so far this year.
About two weeks ago, I finally moved out of my parent's house and in together with my girlfriend in our own first apartment!
I never moved houses in my conscious life so far, so all of this moving stuff was very new to me. But we had the support of both our families and lots of helping hands, which made the actual moving day a lot less stressful than I expected[2].
We have since become accustomed to the new living conditions and things work out well so far. Not everything is finished yet (right now, there are still boxes full of my books next to me, for example, that I still have to store somewhere), but we’re getting there.
Despite the usual challenges that such a change provides, we are both delighted with this new space that we get to call home now.
Creativity & Sport: What’s going on
Because of all the things above, I have unfortunately slacked a bit on the creative front. But I hope that, with things getting back to normal now, I’ll have more time again to dedicate to this website and other projects I want to tackle. So if all goes along as planned, you can expect to hear from me a bit more frequently in the coming weeks and months on this blog.
I still aim to build v2 of this website with Kirby CMS and a slight redesign[3] soon. And I also plan to finally commit and build one of these Laravel project ideas that are still floating around my head. Keep a look at my /now page to stay up to date on that front!
I’m pretty proud to say that I was able to follow my running training plan quite well during all this time. I’m still training for the Grand Prix Bern, a 10-Mile race that takes place in a couple of weeks. My goal is to beat my time from last year (which was around 01:20:00) and maybe even break the 01:17:00 mark. Fingers crossed, that all this training will pay off like it did for the exams.
As for long-term running goals, I still aim to run my first marathon this year (the one in Lausanne in October). It’s still a long way to go with plenty of kilometers to get in, but I hope to be able to publish a “Life Update: I ran my first marathon” this year.
Now, back to studying, working, settling in, creating and running – there are still loads of things to do!
Which – to my surprise – worked very well. There were still some errors in the answers sometimes, but spotting them proved to be quite a good exercise for consolidating my understanding. ↩︎
I still hope that I won’t have to move again in the foreseeable future, though… ↩︎
This site is now almost 1 year old and there hasn’t been a redesign yet, can you believe it? ↩︎
I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.
I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.
I’m the same. While I may work on a post off and on for a period of time (so, I suppose, that is a draft) I rarely have a draft laying around for very long. And I almost never have multiple drafts lingering.
Sometimes I create this daily entry without having anything to write about in mind. It seems necessary, but is it? Probably not, yet I keep doing it, anyway.
