My things

A few days ago, I wrote about returning to genealogy after a break of almost ten years. Since then, the tree has already started growing again — not simply by adding names, but by finding documents, correcting assumptions, contacting archives and municipalities, and gradually turning names into people with histories. The image above shows where my own ancestry stands today, with me as the focal point and the branches expanding backwards through the generations. Looking at a family tree this way is quite different from looking at a simple list of names and dates. You begin to see its shape. And, perhaps more importantly, you immediately see the gaps. The German side is taking shape My paternal side is predominantly German, and this is currently the more developed part of the tree. Several branches now reach well into the 18th century, with families such as Berendsen, Erichsen, Nissen, Brömel, Götz, Jacobsen and Hänsel appearing across Schleswig-Holstein and neighbouring areas. There i...

Since around 2020, I have been looking for the right personal software project. I did not want another small programming exercise, a collection of disconnected experiments or something that existed only to demonstrate a particular C++ feature. I wanted a real application: something sufficiently large to force me to think about architecture, object modelling, persistence, user interfaces, data manipulation, portability, security, testing and eventually packaging and distribution. Most importantly, I wanted to return to something I have always enjoyed: developing software in C++. After considering different possibilities, and partly because of circumstances in my personal life, I eventually settled on an application for table and seating organisation . The concept sounds simple. Organise an event, define the available tables, enter the guests and determine where everybody should sit. From a software-engineering perspective, however, it quickly becomes much more in...

Based on a LinkedIn post originally published on 17 March 2026 Living in different countries teaches you that every society has a user interface. I do not mean only websites, mobile applications or ticket machines. The interface includes every point at which a person interacts with the systems around them: public transport; government services; healthcare; banking; postal services; utilities; and the administrative processes of everyday life. These systems reveal how a society understands the relationship between institutions and the people who depend on them. One of my largest surprises after moving to Germany was how complex and unintuitive some public-facing systems could feel—particularly public transport. A system may be internally logical and still be confusing to everyone who does not understand the organisation behind it. The promise and the experience When we first moved to Germany, we decided to rely heavily on trains for intercity travel. On paper, the proposition appeared s...

Publication note: This article was written many months ago but was only published today, following a very valuable meeting. The chapter about Moldova was written today. Business concept: This article is associated with my business idea for a Digital Security Twin. Why modern organisations cannot adequately protect what they do not fully understand Cybersecurity has traditionally been presented as a problem of protection. Organisations deploy firewalls, identity platforms, endpoint protection, vulnerability scanners, cloud-security products, monitoring systems, configuration databases, ticketing platforms, and many other specialised tools. Each one protects or observes a particular part of the environment. Despite this investment, a fundamental problem remains unresolved: Most organisations do not possess a continuously maintained and trustworthy model of what their digital environment actually is, how its components depend on one another, and what would happen if someth...