# Hello Blog, I'm Moritz


Hey there! My name is Moritz, I am a recently graduated Machine Learning Engineer from Germany and this is the site I want to use to share experiences, opinions, and information with the world. I am most interested in Computer Vision, NLP, and generative AI of all modalities - both for real world use cases solving actual problems, and also just for fun.

While I sure wish that this could be useful for some, it is more of a writing exercise for myself. In the times of social media monopolies and SEO-optimized AI slop, I do not expect many people to stumble across my articles. 

## Reasons to start a blog
There are many reasons to blog, and it serves different purposes for different people. Here, I want to briefly think about *my* intentions to start writing.

### Structuring thoughts and intentions
I wanted to write on this blog for quite some time, but never got around to it - mainly because writing articles does not come naturally to me. But there is something fascinating about it, enforcing the structuring of thoughts, which I often avoid when tinkering with personal projects in my free time.

One of my favourite YouTubers, [Van Neistat](https://www.youtube.com/@vanneistat), recently published a video on this topic. He framed tinkering as the "easy flow state" and writing as the "hard flow state", and I can relate to that even though the analogy does not perfectly translate to my profession. Tinkering is my case is starting side projects, experimenting with the latest advancements in generative AI, or learning a new framework. It is fun but doesn't hold me accountable - I can stop at any time or find something new to do (shiny objects are truly shiny in AI). And one of the goals of this blog is this dynamic to end.

{{< youtube zmO8uGIl9gk >}}

### Digital diary, opportunity for reflection
I am sure that it is normal to forget about projects and experiences after a while, but I tend to not forget details about them but rather forget that they happened at all. One of the professional advices that float around online is to keep a "bragging document" (I think I heard about it initially from [Steve Huynh](https://www.youtube.com/@ALifeEngineered)), which is a collection of problems you solved at your job that had real measurable impact. Documenting achievements and learnings is important, especially if you're fast to forget because you quickly move onto the next problem to solve. And while I started doing that professionally, I want to have a similar documentation for my side projects and hobbies - something to reflect about, draw lessons from, and remember. That is the second reason for this blog.

### Exercising the writing muscle
It has already been said that I don't consider myself to be a good writer. The language barrier is not really part of the problem, I couldn't write more coherent in German either - it is rather a lack of training combined with missing talent. The latter I have to accept, but the former I can change. In my (over four year long) career as a working student at kern.ai, I have been filling many roles. One of the roles I functioned in was the "Developer Advocate", spreading the word about our open-source tooling in articles, on conferences, through tutorials, sample projects, and documentation. While I really enjoyed the social aspect of that role, I think reflecting back on it I was not as efficient as a writer. I like teaching and mentoring, so desinging tutorials is right up my alley, but I just couldn't enter the flow state as easily when writing it down. That is something I want to actively address and train - which is the final reason to start this blog.


<!-- ## Accountability
In early stages of life you live with a lot of supervision. Parents and teachers guide you to do the things that they consider the correct development steps towards adulthood. Especially in education, you get a lot of accountability checks by default - grades, homework, deadlines. University already softens these as professors couldn't care less if you dropped a course of miss the exam, maybe your parents still do, but you're an adult now, you have to make your own decisions. But I think these accountability checks are helpful in all areas of life, especially for things that are inconvenient or uncomfortable but sensible. Blogging, for me, is such a thing. While gamification such as streaks are a great tool for low entry barrier activities (e.g. learning a language for >=5min/day), they are not motivating enough for me when it comes to harder tasks. Afterall, I bought this domain January 2024 (or 2023 even?), but only now am I committing to actually using it. That is why I will adopt a system that has worked for many others: not meeting goals => losing money.

Pieter Levels (known as [levelsio on Twitter](https://x.com/levelsio)) set up a system for himself that keeps him accountable for hitting the gym. If he does not meet his pre-defined goal of going to the gym four times a week, he sends $100 to his friend. As my friends are all rich and beautiful, I will instead donate that money to a non-profit of my choice. My goal is to publish at least one blog post every week for the entirety of 2025 (will review the system then). I'll start with 30€ as this already hurts my europoor heart enough to be motivating and permanently increase this amount by 5€ for every missed posting. I'll share the donation receipts on here.

{{< x user=levelsio id=1863573300472930656 >}} -->