Blog on Casual Coding

That feeling of working in software in 2026

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 13:10:00 +0200

I remember the first time I used an AI coding tool. It must have been around 2022 as I had just received access to Github Copilot. The first feature I tried were auto completions.

The completions were wildly off sometimes, but in most cases I would type and it would auto-fill the following lines with an implementation close to what I had in mind. It was fun. It felt a little magic, but was clearly an optional helper to the day-to-day tasks of writing software.

The simple joys of casual game development

Sun, 14 Sep 2025 21:00:00 +0200

A few months ago, I embarked on a journey into the world of casual game development. Using simple, constrained environments like Pico-8 and TIC-80, I build small, often imperfect games purely for fun. This experiment has turned into a new and relaxing hobby.

My environment of choice: A fantasy console

Pico-8 is a compact game engine that feels like stepping back into the golden age of personal computing. With Lua as its programming language and integrated tools for coding, sprite creation, and sound design, you have everything to build a complete game inside a single environment.

Moving to Hugo

Thu, 26 Jun 2025 13:18:14 +0200

I have so far avoided the typical “here’s my blogging tech stack” post that is then followed by the silence of not writing another post for several months.

But you know what? Here it is anyways.

Leaving Wordpress

I have been a Wordpress user since 2006 or 2007. And I‘ve always been a fan. Still am, in a way.

The fact that the Wordpress instance I installed circa 2010 still self-updates 15 years later without any hiccups is impressive. I also think the Gutenberg block editor for posts and pages is excellent.

Building a cyber oracle using a local LLM on a Raspberry Pi 5

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

For a few years now, I have been a regular attendant of the Chaos Communication Congress, this year called #38C3. But this congress is more fun when you bring your own project instead of only attending talks.

The idea: Let’s build a cyber oracle: A small machine for visitors to collect a prophecy in the style of a cyber punk fortune cookie. In 2024, we should be able to run a LLM (large-ish language model) on a small computer and let it do it’s thing, right? As it turns out: Yes, pretty much.

New publication: A paper about situated interaction published at Neurips in 2024

Thu, 16 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I have added a new entry to the “publications” section of my About page for a paper that I’ve been a co-author of.

This contribution dates back to my earlier work at Twenty Billion Neurons in Berlin, the AI company that has since been acquired by Qualcomm.

In that role, I worked on the Python source code of the real-time inference stack that’s still in use at Qualcomm and I was involved in early work that went into the dataset which is now being made public as part of the paper.

Building a tiny sports guessing game using Go

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A few things have coincided this summer: I had some time on my hands, I wanted to play around with the programming language Go, and Euro 2024 has been happening in Germany (I’m not a big football fan, but I do enjoy following the big tournaments every 2 years).

Long story short, I’ve worked through the (excellent!) book “Let’s Go” and have built a very rough web app just in time for the kickoff match in June.

Learning something new: React Native

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Over the end-of-year slowdown and the holidays, I’ve started to learn something new: React Native (and TypeScript along with it). It’s refreshing to approach a technology I haven’t actively used with a beginner’s mindset. Plus, it’s fun to build stuff.

A new tech stack for me: React Native and TypeScript

React Native is a framework to build mobile apps for both iOS and Android using the same codebase (which is either JavaScript or TypeScript).

Exploring the Fediverse

Sun, 18 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Like many, I have been looking for a new digital community in the past few weeks (the old one is on fire) and have found a place on Mastodon.

You can find and follow me at https://sigmoid.social/@florian

I’ve picked the Mastodon instance sigmoid.social, an AI-related instance that is only 3 months old but already has close to 7000 users.

Machines talking to each other

Each Mastodon instance has a public API so it’s straightforward to fetch some basic statistics even without any authentication. I wrote some simple Python scripts to fetch basic info about my home instance.

New domain

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Welcome to casualcoding.com, the new location of my blog.

If you’re one of the few who still use RSS feeds, make sure to update your feed URL to https://casualcoding.com/feed. The old URLs will redirect automatically, but better safe than sorry.

Book Review: Deep learning for coders with fastai and PyTorch

Sun, 19 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

For a few years now, the team from fast.ai has been providing free education about deep learning on their website. Their video course promises a hands-on approach that aims to de-mystify the technologies of modern deep learning. With the book “Deep Learning for coders with fast.ai”, they bring these education principles to the written format, either as a printed book from O’Reilly or on Github (for free).

Before I talk about the book, some context: fast.ai is the name of a website with a video course of the same name. The course is taught using a Python library (called fastai, no dot) which is built on top of PyTorch, the popular deep learning framework. Nomenclature can be confusing. I’ll try to be specific and reference “the fast.ai team” or “the fastai library” in this review of the book.

Understanding your cat's meows using a neural network

Sun, 04 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

“Meow” — I’m sorry? “Meow!” — Oh, right! Here you go.

What if I could understand exactly what my cat is trying to tell me? We live in 2021, which is basically the future. How hard can it be?

What’s on your mind, little Loki? With the power of neural networks, maybe soon I’ll know.

A dataset of meows

A group of dedi_cat_ed researchers from northern Italy has recently released a public dataset of cat vocalizations (let’s call them “meows”). 21 cats from two different breeds were exposed to three different situations while a microphone was listening:

Book Review: Machine Learning Design Patterns

Sun, 27 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

If you are anything like me, “machine learning” to you means working with algorithms that adapt their function from data. And while this is true, it’s not the complete story when actually working in the field of machine learning.

Yes, picking the right algorithm and creating the appropriate model is important. But data cleaning, optimizing for production, and setting up scalable infrastructure is just as much part of the day-to-day work on the job.

How I spy on my cats when I'm not at home

Sun, 20 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

With a second cat moving in this week, I am even more curious than before about what happens at home when no human is around.

There is a range of products that offer pet monitoring. Given I have an unused Raspberry Pi and a spare webcam lying around, I decided to DIY the solution.

Building a pet cam using a Raspberry Pi, a webcam and tailscale

As it turns out, this is easy: Take a Raspberry Pi, connect a webcam and install motion - an open source tool that exposes the webcam stream over the local network.

Building an AI-powered juggling trainer in one afternoon

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Ever since I’ve picked up my first set of bean bags as a kid, juggling has become a hobby that has stayed with me over the years. In my later teens and during my time at university, one of my part-time jobs was being a juggling teacher. I worked at a local youth club, at events and fairs, and had the chance to teach juggling to many people — starting from just 4 or 5 years old to seniors in their late 70s.

Running a Remote Data Science Study Group

Sat, 29 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Earlier this year, a few friends and I have started a remote Data Science study group. Since then, we’ve met once a week to talk about Data Science, Machine Learning, and Python. Our aim is to get better, together. In this article, I want to share how we’ve set up the group and what has been working for us so far.

Why?

There are a plethora of reasons why running a remote study group for any topic is a good idea. Here’s what motivated me.

How to Scrape Amazon for your Data Science Project

Sun, 10 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

If you are interested in anything that is sold nowadays, there is no way around Amazon. For your data science project that requires product data, you may wonder how to access their product data programmatically. Put simply, you have two different options: Speak to the Amazon product API or scrape the website directly.

Average review, date of publication: The results on Amazon include a lot of interesting meta data:

Attending a Remote Hackathon

Fri, 01 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

2020 is the year of doing things remotely. It was therefore my home home office and a healthy internet connection that provided the space to participate in the AI for Good hackathon last weekend, organized by Deep Berlin. The task description was broad, but it pointed the teams to work on something related to climate change, specifically the occurrence of wildfires.

As a team of four, we spend the weekend looking at the relation of human activity and wildfires. We focused on data about touristic activity in Northern Spain, an area that has seen intense wildfire seasons in the past.