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Where the Community Comes Home: Two Days With Six Years of TUM.ai

Seventy-seven people, twelve batches, and two days in the Bavarian Alps. The TUM.ai retreat was the first time I met the alumni who turned a 2020 group chat into the thing I help run today.

TUM.ai

Retreat

Community

23.06.2026

Experience

Build the Most Absurd Thing: An Onboarding Hackathon with a Squabbling AI Council

Thirty-five new TUM.ai members, a weekend away, and two hours to build the most absurd thing they could. I designed the format and a panel of squabbling AI personas that pelted each team with bonus challenges, while the room voted on the winner.

Making NeatPass: From an Annoying PDF Ticket to an App

An annoying party ticket PDF became a privacy-first iOS app: an AI brain that runs entirely on your phone, signing Wallet passes without ever seeing their contents, and the decision against every subscription.

Third at the EuroTech Hong Kong Hackathon: A Wafer Defect Detector in 24 Hours

Four TUM students, a semiconductor problem none of us had touched a week earlier, and 24 hours. We built a wafer defect-detection workbench with few-shot anomaly detection on a frozen DINOv2 encoder and took third in AI & Robotics.

XCStringsTranslator: AI-Translating Apple .xcstrings Files

A Python CLI that translates Apple .xcstrings files with Claude, GPT, and Gemini. Born from building NeatPass and wanting to ship in languages I don't speak.

Apple Wallet Support Tracker: A Dataset That Maintains Itself

An open dataset that researches and corrects itself. A monthly cron fires a Claude orchestrator that spawns parallel agents to fact-check Apple Wallet support and open PRs.

sideQuest: When AI Meets the Open Road

Building an on-device AI road trip companion at TUM's iPraktikum, with 8 students, one industry partner, and a toy Tesla

From Threads DM to Live on Air

How a viral NeatPass post turned into 45 minutes on Germany's 'Ich glaube, es h@ckt' IT security podcast, discussing zero-knowledge signing, on-device ML, and indie app privacy.

RadioAtlas – Discovering the World One Station at a Time

How I built an award-winning SwiftUI & SwiftData radio explorer with a map-first UX, Radio Browser API integration, and Apple ecosystem polish.

Google's TPU Journey: How Custom Silicon Revolutionized AI Computing

Deep dive into Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPU v1-v3), the custom AI chips that delivered 80x better efficiency than GPUs and sparked the domain-specific computing revolution.

PartyMap: Mapping the Nightlife Landscape with AI

How I built a real-time nightlife map that turns social posts into structured events using AWS serverless, LLMs, and Mapbox.

CVolve: The AI-Powered Résumé Builder

How I built an AI-driven résumé builder that uses a multi-stage agentic pipeline to tailor, write, critique, and improve your résumé for any job description.

EuroMesh: Crisis Communication at TUM.ai Hackathon

Developed EuroMesh, a mesh-networked digital embassy concept, securing 2nd place at the TUM.ai x Public Makers Hackathon. Focused on resilient crisis communication systems.