Why the blog, why now?

Hi!

Thank you for taking the time to visit my tiny blog, which will hopefully grow over time.
I’ve wanted to do this for a while but never started. As so often, I had enough other topics to juggle whenever I thought about it. Well, that has changed a bit.

Why a blog?

If you know me, you know that I barely use social media. I still have a Facebook account and a Bluesky account, but I hardly ever use them. The best place to find me is LinkedIn, and I wasn’t very active there either.
I could post on LinkedIn, but it would just drown among all the other posts flooding everyone’s feeds.

So I chose to make my own blog. With nice styling. Something I have complete control over. If you want to reach out and talk, there still is LinkedIn and the other channels.

So what about the mango? Why MagneticMango?

Once upon a time there were other names. Nicknames, project names…
Back in the day, my coworkers during my on-the-job training started calling me Mr. Grey because of my last name. So I started using GreyWorks as my project(?) name. (Yes, I know the American spelling is gray. I chose the British one back then and stuck with it.) Even my study buddies started calling me “Grey”.

I wasn’t sure whether I should keep using that. So I started brainstorming a domain name for my experiments. After some back and forth with a few friends, I went with MagneticMango. I still tend to stick two words together, because the only unique one-word names are completely made-up ones, and I didn’t find any good ones. I love mangos, and MagneticMango just sounded nice. It makes a nice name in general: juicy, attractive and kind of techy.

The project name grew on me so much that I decided to keep it. And here we are.

But why now?

Well… let’s say last week I got jobn’t. Let go for economic reasons. So I’m searching for something new and have some time on my hands. And of course this is a great way to build a storefront for my skills and to show people what I’m about.

Sometimes you need a kick in the guts to get started. So I finally took the time to make a design (with help from Claude) and start building this thing. And I think the overall structure turned out pretty great.

Sooo… thoughts on why jobn’t?

Of course it wasn’t anything I did wrong. It was economic reasons, as I said before.
The big elephant in the room: do I blame AI for having to find a new job?

Partially, I guess. But not really. For me, AI changed the way I work and greatly improved the amount and quality of what I can get done. But of course I’m not the only one this applies to.

But honestly, I blame the state of the world. To put it mildly, our economy is… not in great shape right now. Mostly I blame some leaders who completely wrecked any sense of security and stability.
People want our software and have faith in us, but just don’t dare to spend money on it. Everyone needs to save money, because who knows what happens tomorrow. So we propose ideas, build prototypes, convince people of our abilities and write project proposals. But then… silence. Of course they need time to evaluate and think about it. But it got so bad that planning is nearly impossible. Do the prospects look good? Or not? What will happen? No one knows.

That’s also why I specialized a lot in local, or at least OPEN AI. And I don’t mean the company. I mean open models. Because no one even knows how the AI field will develop in the next few years.

We’ve gone through so much destabilization, especially since 2020, and every time it could get better, we get another setback.

Of course, our own German government isn’t perfect either. Another can of worms.

So… AI?

That needs a whole other post for another time.

I have a rather nuanced view on the topic, and as the little info box on the home page says: I don’t think it’s all just black and white.

What will I write about?

Whatever I’m currently digging into. Every post gets one of five topics:

• Ideas: thoughts and concepts that might turn into something. Or not.
• Creations: things I built. Tools, experiments, this blog.
• Rabbit holes: when I wanted to understand one small thing and came back three days later.
• TIL: short “today I learned” notes. Small things I found useful.
• Opinions: like this post. My view on things.

Expect a lot of AI (especially local and open models), 3D and image processing, and whatever else catches my attention.

Thanks for taking the time to read this

I appreciate it, even if your agent just gave you the gist of it. And I hope you’ll consider reading more of my ramblings in the future.