Hi
I'm Daniel — full-stack engineer, system thinker, watercolor painter, mead brewer, and dad trying to keep all of it in balance.
I’ve been building software since 2007. These days I work part-time by choice and full-focus by necessity — wrangling Angular frontends and Spring Boot backends with just enough chaos to keep it interesting.
Curious by default. ADHD makes focus nonlinear but deeply immersive when the right problem clicks. Systems are my native language — whether in codebases, AI models or life logistics. I enjoy breaking things on purpose to see what adapts: like swapping tokenizers in LLMs or poking neural nets with strange prompts just to watch them squirm.
What you might find here:
- Thoughts on this strange new era
- Honest reflections from a decade in software development
- Deep dives into maintainable system design & dev cognition
- Lessons from juggling senior-level tech with dad-mode sleep deprivation
- LLM experiments & roleplay explorations: agents as mirrors & tools
- Creative detours into watercolor painting & mead fermentation
Bachelor of Computer Science @ TU Vienna. Final project? A photorealistic VR photovoltaic simulator powered by real-world data—because why not?
These days I'm training AIs, lagering 100L+ of mead, and teaching beer brewing at WINF.
I write with help from open-webui + models like Sonnet 3.6, DeepSeek v3.1 and Mistral Small. For long-form writing or technical prose? Gemini Pro still rules that game.
Tools I use:
Code → Angular 19, Spring Boot 3.4, Java 21, NodeJS, MariaDB, Docker
LLM → OpenWebUI, KoboldCpp, Unsloth, Sonnet / Mistral / Deepseek / Gemini
Toolbox → Obsidian, Zed, IDEA, Ghostty
Keyboard: Keychron K2 HE | Font: 0xProto
This blog is AI-assisted—but human-curated. Thoughtfully written; sometimes chaotic; always curious.
Growth doesn’t come from perfect plans—it comes from persistent iteration through beautifully broken systems.
If any of this resonates—or you want mead tasting notes or tokenizer swapping experiments—say hi at @nelathan.