What I’m up to Now

This /now page is inspired by Derek Sivers’ idea. See nownownow.com. Or check out more general information about me or what hardware and tools I currently use or what sort of things I have planned for the future on my bucket list.

Last updated on May 3rd, 2023.

🪨 Basics

Living in Hamburg, Germany. Amazing wife, four wonderful daughters aged between 4 and 11.
Working as the CEO of a web design and development company, four employees.
Blogging about sports and other things at teesche.com 😉

👨‍👩‍👧‍👧 Family

Education of the four daughters is never finished, new questions and challenges arise every day. Lots of coordination between friends and hobbies. The harder months of winter are slowly coming to an end and this is apparent in the mood of the kids and adults. Much more time outside makes us all happy.
Spending deliberate time with all of them, mostly in the mornings and evenings. Many afternoons, too.
Looking forward to the next 1on1 trips which I do with my older daughters. Every daughter who goes to school can select a European city to visit for a weekend (must prove knowledge and reasoning for the choice first). #1 and I will go to Paris in May, checking out the Eiffel Tower and Louvre. In the meantime, #3 is also allowed a trip since she moved up and is in school now, and is currently eying Salzburg, Austria, for early summer of 2023.

💻 Business

Nearly 12 years in, I have been working on applying some structural as well as strategical changes to the company I’ve been running. We have just made one of our SaaS products a new stand-alone company together with a Berlin-based team of two Marketing professionals, and additionally I have just sold half of my company and added a new Co-CEO. Exciting times!
A new direction for the company feels right, but an additional commercial activity isn’t out of the question for me, either. Trying out more writing and writing-related stuff, as well as coding of fun side projects which could maybe be developed into something bigger later.

💪 Health & Exercise

I’m streak running since January 1st of 2022, which today are 512 days. At least one mile (1.6 km) per day, ’cause those are the rules! The rough goal is to make it to 1,000 days, which will happen on 27th of September, 2024. In the meantime, I was accepted into the Streak Runners International, Inc. and am currently ranked #68 of the active Germans.
Aiming to do a ten minute core strengthening workout every day, consisting of usually 2x 10 push-ups, 2x 10 squats, 2x 1:00 min planking, 2x 10 lunges. Lately this has only happened on about 50 percent of days.
The Wim Hof breathing routine still helps me to refocus and catch a breath nearly every day.
Eating fully vegan on about 60-80 percent of all days, but if not, defaulting back to vegetarian. Super rarely some fish, never meat.
Since April 1st, 2023, I have reduced alcohol consumption to zero in order to give this One Year No Beer movement a try. Every day without alcohol or animal products is a win.
Bed time and screen time: aiming to be in bed by 21:30 every night so I regain enough energy for the next day, as well as to keep my mobile screen time below 60 minutes per day – just for staying sane and being more in touch with what’s actually happening instead of what’s happening on the screen.

⌨️ Writing & Coding

I’ve been enjoying writing since I started this blog in 2011, but lately that enjoyment has even increased. Which is why I’m doing more of it. In addition to the blog, You can subscribe to the newsletter, which I use to provide enriched notifications about new posts on the blog.
A few blog post and even book ideas, some of them nearly finished, are lying around in the pipeline, just waiting for me to find the time to make them happen. Those are constantly on my mind, giving me a feeling of unfinished work, but in a positive way.
Tinkering on teesche.com with JavaScript, PHP and MySQL has been more fun lately, too. I’m avoiding using any frameworks or libraries, if I can, so building everything from the ground up is sometimes challenging, but also very rewarding. Check out the Quantified Teesche section.
I have a new little side project on my mind called the Read & Run Club. It’s a web tool to help you increase motivation for running marathons and reading books, since I think both should be done by everyone. You log your books and my code pulls your running activities from Strava (or you can log them manually, too), so there’s a helpful overview for you, as well as regular nudges via email into the right direction. I’m not yet sure when I’ll be ready to publish it.
Another little side project I’m currently working on is called STRAVA BATTLE. Inspiration hit when two runner friends of mine told me about their intention to battle it out over the rest of the year 2022 over who could collect the most amount of running kilometers. They’ve done it before in 2020 and it escalated to a very entertaining level, but it was hard to follow the current status of it – who’s in the lead, how’s the trend been during the last few days, et cetera. Since working with the Strava API on Read & Run Club, it’s now easy for me to build a little tool for everyone to challenge a friend on Strava for a battle, which will then automatically pull the activity data regularly and offer an overview site over all public battles.

🎸 Music & Hobbies

Daily guitar practice, although sometimes for just a few minutes. Still trying to get the major parts from Polyphia’s songs G.O.A.T., 40oz, and Look But Don’t Touch perfect, but then I just had to start practicing their amazing song, Playing God, and it’s so hard. But that’s the fun part for me. Still thinking about their live show I got to attend in Baltimore, beginning of August 2022. 🤟❤️ I recently upgraded my guitars with Tim Henson’s (of Polyphia) signature semi-acoustic, the Ibanez TOD10N, because it sounds and looks so cool. And since my kids took part in a week-long band practice workshop and came out of it wanting to play the electric bass at home, I got one immediately. Playing bass is lots of fun for me as well.
My drums are also used nearly daily by me. Pounding the electronic pads of the Roland TD-17KVX as hard as I can to rather simple songs, mostly those by the Foo Fighters, Rage Against the Machine, or Taking Back Sunday. Not going for improvement of my chops here, it’s mostly because the drumming itself is so satisfactory.
Since 2016, I have decidedly made reading books a new hobby and part of my life. Over the years since then, the amount of books I read has gone up and the fun and knowledge I’ve been collecting, too. Every couple of weeks, I usually finish another book and publish my notes on it here in the /bookshelf section.
Podcasting. Recording sound has been of some interest ever since my time as guitar player in a funk band back in the day, so this year I had the idea that I could just record reading my own new blog posts for those people who want to save time. The result: a Podcast! I enjoy those few hours spending on it every few weeks.

More about my story and history is on the /about page.