03 — What does he think?
Writing about politics, technology and things I build.
A wave of bidding websites is being sold as clever indie building, but it is basically a twenty-year-old advertising gimmick with a new domain, and the money still only reliably moves in one direction.
The AfD’s polling lead in Saxony-Anhalt raises obvious questions about younger voters and the political environment they are growing up in, but my master’s research suggests that the relationship between age, social media, and political choice is more complicated than simply saying that young people are moving to the right.
Germany’s purchase of the F-35 should strengthen its military capabilities and its contribution to European security, which I think is a positive development. At the same time, the fact that Germany and so many other European countries now feel such urgency around rearmament says something much less positive about the world we are living in.
My experience with German bureaucracy has moved constantly between procedures that are surprisingly efficient and procedures that feel like they were designed in a completely different era. Germany clearly has the ability to build good digital public services, which is exactly why it becomes so frustrating when the next administrative process suddenly requires months of waiting, physical documents, expensive postage, and several different authorities.
I would obviously like StreetShape to eventually reach a large number of people, but I increasingly think that the best way to get there is not by trying to launch it to everybody at once. A few real collaborations with organizations that have a specific reason to use the platform would probably teach me much more.
Friedrich Merz and his government keep talking about competitiveness, reform, security, growth, and Germany’s enormous potential. I agree that Germany has huge potential, but that is exactly why I find the gap between what the country is capable of doing and what it actually manages to deliver so frustrating.
CedarField is technically interesting to build because satellite imagery, maps, and agricultural data create a huge number of possibilities, but the difficult question is not what the technology can do. The difficult question is why a farmer who already knows their land and has an established routine would want another service involved in their work.
One of the things I want StreetShape to do is make it possible for ordinary people to express ideas about the places where they live without first needing to understand professional urban-planning terminology. Sometimes somebody simply wants to experiment with how a street could look, while somebody else may have been thinking about one dangerous crossing for years, and I think the same tool can be useful to both.
I want Penci.ly to be affordable enough that somebody with a limited budget can still use it properly, but I also have to build a pricing model that can eventually cover the real cost of keeping an online service running. I know what I want the principle to be, but I still do not know exactly where the line should be.
StreetShape is mainly a software project right now, but the idea behind it could eventually go much further than building an editor. If people use the platform to organize around real street improvements or even contribute money toward implementing them, then the organizational and legal structure behind StreetShape becomes just as important as the software itself.
CedarField started from a fairly simple question that I keep coming back to when I think about technology in Lebanon: we constantly hear about what new technology can do, but how much of that progress actually reaches people in their everyday work?
Building Penci.ly has made me think much more seriously about something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly difficult when you are actually developing software: adding more features does not always make a product more useful.