Writing
Thinking in public: defense, fieldwork, and what building things teaches.
Why Ground Movement Is Crucial
In July I wrote that [nothing moves in the kill zone](/blog/nothing-moves-in-the-kill-zone). This is part two: what a unit loses with its movement, and what happened this autumn when one Ukrainian corps took it back. ## What crosses the kill zone The kill zone is the strip along the front where drones find and hit whatever moves. In May the commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces [put its depth](https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2026/05/14/8034645/) at 25 kilometers or more on each side.…
Who Stays on Your Street
For two years I was on call with our volunteer fire brigade. The alarm could come at any hour, and when it did, you dropped whatever you were doing and drove to the station. Around fifty times a year I left a meal, a conversation or my bed that way, and I never once asked myself what I was leaving behind. A call meant a burning shed, a car in a ditch or someone who had fallen at home, and while we dealt with it, the rest of the village carried on exactly as before. This year I have been thinking…
Nothing Moves in the Kill Zone
"Nothing moves in the kill zone." That was the key line in our pitch at European Defense Tech Hackathon Munich 2026, where we finished as one of three winning teams. It's one I think about a lot. We built for what happens under the surface. If the air above a unit belongs to someone else, you move what keeps them alive below ground. This is as old as warfare itself: royal Assyrian inscriptions describe undermining tactics around 700 BCE. But the concrete solution was never really the point for…
The Valley of Death Is a Production Problem
A few years ago I shut down a product its first users loved. It was an internal venture I owned end to end: a microlearning product, small team, around sixty discovery interviews behind it. People who tried it wanted it; the demand was measured and real. And I folded it back into the company's portfolio instead of spinning it out, because the thing that made it good couldn't be produced at scale. The quality came from two people distilling decades of hard-won experience into lessons crisp enough…
Moats in the Age of AI
Last year, we shipped a new scheduling feature for a veterinary practice management system. One-page appointment creation. Intelligent slot suggestions based on practitioner availability and appointment type. <200ms load time. By every standard we thought mattered, it was better than what existed. Users who tried it agreed. They said it was faster, cleaner, easier to understand. And then they went back to the old app. They waited 20 seconds for it to load. They clicked through three screens to…
Biggest Challenges in Fawn Rescue
It's 9 PM, the phone rings. A farmer wants to mow tomorrow: five fields, no coordinates, "the meadow behind the inn, left along the dirt road." I've already spent eight hours at the office today, was out in the field at 4 AM, and now I need to put together a team for tomorrow morning. I've lived through this exact scenario countless times over the past few years. Welcome to fawn rescue. There are many challenges in this volunteer work, from recruiting volunteers to insurance obligations and…
Why I'm Building Scout
Scout was born from a simple observation: fawn rescue needs better tools. Every year, one hundred thousand fawns are killed during mowing season in Germany. Many dedicated rescuers want to change that. Often, paper maps, WhatsApp groups, or Excel spreadsheets are used to coordinate, plan, and execute rescue missions. The result: extreme workload and stress on top of the sleep deprivation that comes from carrying fawns out of meadows every morning at 4 AM. Scout is meant to help. - Easy to use,…