After a Business Degree in Edinburgh, working in Finance in the City of London and studying for some qualifications at the same time, a degree in Computational Science and Engineering at the ETH and a short stint as research assistant, in Summer of 2022 I decided to take some time off regular life.
In part that’s because I felt that I had spent my whole life just studying and working, sometimes both at the same time. In part that’s because I felt overworked and I needed a break. I also wanted to get some distance from regular life so I could further explore the many topics I’m interested in.
So after almost 15 years abroad I returned to Austria to spend a bit more time with my family and so I don’t have to pay for rent. The latter point in particular is quite important when you’re planning to have no income for some time 🙂 .
When I say returned to Austria then I mean officially live there. In the first year I wasn’t actually there very much because I spent a lot of time traveling. Most memorable is a 3.5 months trip to India, Thailand and Indonesia.
Upon returning to Austria I started working on all sorts of projects that I find interesting. A large number of them is related to numerical simulations and machine learning1, even more have to do with the technological side of photography. One reason for making this blog is to document what I’ve been looking at. I think that’s useful for a few reasons:
- Publishing something online forces me to be (even more2) thorough with my work.
- After a little while you forget what you’ve worked on. Having written it up in your (my) own words makes it easier to get back into when required.
- Hopefully other people can benefit from my posts. I try to make my explanations as concise and clear as possible.
Since I only started documenting my projects quite recently, most of the work I’ve done over the past year is not yet on this website. I will add it when and if I find the time. However, new projects take precedence because writing them up well takes almost as much time as doing them in the first place, and the newer projects are fresher in my memory.
Another aspect I want to cover on this blog is the history of vision and optics. I’ve been a history buff for a long time3. History teaches you so much. However, I think that there’s a lack of technology-related history on YouTube. Well, there are some channels but none that present it in a way that I really like (I want to know the historical context, a description of the actual developments and the consequences of a new technology – and all of that enhanced with a replication of some of the experiments that were really done). So once I’ve wrapped my head around the huge amount of historical material available we’ll be looking at vision and optics, starting from the Ancient Greeks to the present.
Finally, I very much enjoy working on these projects. Thus, if at all possible, I’d like to find a way to make a living from them. Right now I’m not sure if and how that will work, presumably through some form of advertising or freelance work. Hopefully I’ll figure it out before my savings are used up 😉 .
Happy reading!
Some additional comments:
- Numerical simulations, machine learning, fluid dynamics and quantum mechanics were the main topics of my second degree (BSc/MSc Computational Science and Engineering at the ETH in Zürich). ↩︎
- After I finished my first degree (MA Business Studies at the University of Edinburgh) I moved to London for a Graduate Scheme at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. In one of the rotations I had a boss who found small mistakes in pretty much everything I gave to him to review. That was quite a hit to my ego. Also, like pretty much everybody else I knew, I had attention to detail written on my CV which obviously wasn’t true. So I started to pay a lot more attention while I was working and before submitting my work I repeatedly checked if everything was ok. After some time my boss didn’t find (m)any mistakes anymore. That made both him and me quite happy 🙂 This real attention to detail also came in handy when I started my second degree, which was orders of magnitude more challenging that the first one (and than my job in London). ↩︎
- I don’t even have a Netflix or Amazon Prime account, when I watch something it’s typically some lecture series on Wondrium (and sometimes videos on YouTube). ↩︎