philip

philip

@heltweg.org

Freelance Technical Product Manager & Engineer · PhD Computer Science · Founder at isselthal | Visit https://heltweg.org & https://isselthal.com :)

5.4K followers230 following1.3K posts

philip
@heltweg.org

Look at all the old session logs I could import for my old #dnd westmarches campaign. Long pause from 2024 to now, but were back 🙌.

philip
@heltweg.org

In case you are searching a technical partner to work on your product: I wrote a short intro to where you can find and approach them, from the viewpoint of a technical person that had to read "let's do a short intro call!" too many times 😮‍💨. isselthal.com/blog/how-to...

isselthal.comHow to Find a Technical Co-Founder or Technical Partner | isselthalAn engineer's advice for non-technical founders and domain experts on preparing an idea, finding technical help, and approaching potential partners.
philip
@heltweg.org

Still need to de-sloppify the UI, but just installed my rage-vibecoded Trello replacement on my phone 😌. Time to move some tasks over. I need some french feedback though, I love the t'inquiète pas branding as "don't worry", but I think it can also have a "it's not your business" vibe. Is that true?

philip
@heltweg.org

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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 : 🧵 ⬇️

philip
@heltweg.org

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 :).

philip
@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".

philip
@heltweg.org

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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 :).

philip
@heltweg.org

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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 🤩 .

philip
@heltweg.org

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?

philip
@heltweg.org

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.orgEvolving Plans - Looking Back on the First Half of 2026 | Philip HeltwegA 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.
philip
@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 🤩.

philip
@heltweg.org

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 :).

philip reposted

ceej
@ceej.online

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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...

philip
@heltweg.org

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 😅.)

philip
@heltweg.org

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?

philip
@heltweg.org

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 😅.

philip
@heltweg.org

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

philip
@heltweg.org

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 🙈 .

philip
@heltweg.org

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.

philip
@heltweg.org

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?

philip
@heltweg.org

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? 😬

philip
@heltweg.org

@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 :)

philip
@heltweg.org

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 ✨ .

philip
@heltweg.org

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

Do you know of other projects with a similar idea? Also, if you want to join the book club: www.heltweg.org/posts/book-... :)

heltweg.orgBook Club: Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition | Philip HeltwegJoin me in an async, email-based book club reading Designing Data-Intensive Applications, 2nd Edition. Inspired by Phil Eaton, we'll regularly discuss asynchronously via email and not have no video calls. Every level of experience and participation is welcome :).
philip
@heltweg.org

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 } 🧵

philip
@heltweg.org

Of course, the book builds from there and explains concepts such as SSTables, B-Trees, Column-Oriented Storage, Embeddings etc. But it reminded me that even crazy complicated engineering often has very simple fundamentals.

philip
@heltweg.org

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.

philip
@heltweg.org

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