Personal Notes: Beyond Work

This is not a structured story.
It’s a collection of fragments.

I like building things.
Sometimes useful. Sometimes not. Just things that didn’t exist before.

I learned how to cook soap.
Made a charcoal face soap. It worked.

I built ÉrtékBár, a low-cost POS system. Stock, recipes, orders, billing.

I also built a delivery app for a community-supported kitchen.

It worked.
Then they disappeared.
I can’t reach them anymore.

Systems don’t always fail. Sometimes they just vanish.

I once came across a thread on an Arduino forum where someone tried to stream live video from an ESP device to YouTube. Another user offered a paid solution.

That didn’t sit right with me.

On a community forum, knowledge should be shared, or at least not hidden behind a price tag so loudly.

So I rebuilt the problem from scratch.

The stream worked. At around seven frames per second.

A successful failure. Exactly what the hardware allowed.

In the end, I shared the solution as open source.

After university, I used a Karnaugh table exactly once.
It was to simplify delivery conditions.

Years of theory distilled into a single, oddly satisfying moment.

Knowing where to look is often more valuable than knowing the answer.

In school, I once built a battery-powered digital clock on a prototyping board.

It looked suspicious enough that the school thought it might be a bomb.

The principal got involved.

I didn’t win the competition.
But I got a special award for the show.

Fair...

Years later, I found it again.

I had even designed a small PCB for the display and its driver transistors back then.

So I rebuilt it into a permanent clock.
It still used the same battery.
A heavy, black 4.5Ah unit from an old alarm system.
It had spent decades on a shelf. Still alive.

Some components age.
Some just wait.

I used another one to build a torch.
Buying one would have been easier.
But I already had the parts.
Sometimes building is not about efficiency.
It’s about continuation.

I’ve rewritten the same idea multiple times.

Each version felt final.
None of them were.

The strangest constraint I’ve worked with reached something around 10^1851 combinations.

At that point, you don’t manage data.
You navigate a universe.

The simplest interface often hides the most complicated system behind it.

I like tools that do one thing well.
And systems that know when not to do more.

I don’t like mushrooms.

No deeper philosophy here.

I’ve volunteered in different places over the years. Animal shelters. Community restoration projects. The kind of work where progress is slow, visible, and very real.

It changes your sense of scale.

The larger the system, the harder it is to change.
Not because it’s strong, but because it’s entangled.

I want to try hitchhiking across Europe at some point.
Not for efficiency. Quite the opposite.
To let randomness take control for a while.

Documentation is something I struggle with.

Not understanding systems. Not building them. But explaining them clearly, consistently, in a way that survives time.

This portfolio is part of that effort.

I’ve tried to improve many systems.
Some didn’t want to be improved.

That might be the hardest constraint of all.

I’ve learned things that don’t fit here.
Shibari is one of them. Don’t Google it. Not safe for work.

Context matters.
Consent required.

I’ve created mods for games like Minecraft and Factorio.

There’s something satisfying about modifying systems that are already systems.
Like adding a new rule to a universe and watching how it adapts.

Somewhere on the internet, on prog.hu, there’s a question under my name about global variables in Java.

It’s not a good question.

It still exists.

That’s fine.

As an intern, I once had to explain to a senior colleague why storing raw passwords in a database is a bad idea.

That conversation alone probably paid for my education.

During university, I was part of BME-Matrix.

An event where an entire dorm building became a giant display using its windows. Eighteen floors. Light as pixels.

We worked on one of the early generations of the system.

Later, during the Schönherz Qpa competition, we made a “replacement tram for a replacement bus” as a kind of guerrilla action.

It made sense at the time.

Some ideas make sense immediately.
Others need years before they click.

I tried archaeology in Germany.
Which mostly meant digging and shoveling.
The work was interesting.

The bureaucracy was… also a system.

I notice patterns. And mistakes.
In code. In systems. In everyday situations.
Sometimes I point them out.
Sometimes I don’t.

Small inconsistencies tend to point at larger problems.

Some systems look correct on paper.

Until Reality disagrees.

Just because something can be optimized doesn’t mean it should be.

I like working in teams.

Not because teams are always efficient, but because they are combinatorial.

No one invents something truly new alone. We remix. We recombine. Like colors that can’t exist individually, but emerge when mixed.

A good team doesn’t remove mistakes.
It makes them visible sooner.

I like when things flow.

Data, materials, ideas.

When they don’t, something is wrong.

I still make mistakes.

Just slightly more interesting ones.

A good life, for me, is not extreme.

It’s balanced.

Some work. Some rest. Some social life. Some time for my own ideas.

Enough structure to move forward. Enough freedom to not feel trapped.

My mornings are simple.

Coffee.
One-to-one ratio with milk.
Four sugars and a spoon of honey.

But don’t stir it.
I don’t like it sweet.

Some background noise. A podcast, maybe.
It’s a small system that works.

I’m still figuring things out.

But at least now I know what kind of questions to ask.