Snow, altitude and long days.
I spend a lot of my life in the mountains. Skiing and teaching skiing in winter, touring and climbing when the snow allows it, triathlon the rest of the year, and a camera in the bag for all of it.
- 01
Skiing — and teaching it
I am a qualified ski instructor. Teaching is the part I did not expect to love: you have roughly one run to work out what a person is actually doing wrong, and one sentence to fix it. It is diagnosis under time pressure, which turns out to be a transferable skill.
Certified ski instructorCertified Nordic walking instructorAlpine & ski touring - 02
Mountains
Mountaineering and ski touring, mostly in the Alps around Liechtenstein, Austria and northern Italy. Route planning, weather windows, turnaround times — decisions made with incomplete information and real consequences. I have turned back more times than I have summited, and that is the point.
Alpine touringMountaineeringLiving in the Alps - 03
Triathlon
Swim, bike, run. Endurance sport is the most honest feedback loop I know: you cannot argue with a split time, you cannot cram the training, and the plan that looked clever in January gets audited every single week.
Structured trainingLong-course enduranceData, obviously - 04
Photography
Mostly mountains, mostly in bad weather, mostly in black and white. It is the one thing I do where the goal is not to optimise anything.
LandscapeMonochromeAlpine
Same appeal, different mountain.
I am not going to claim that ski touring makes me a better data scientist. But the things I choose to do with my free time have an obvious shape to them: hard constraints, measurable outcomes, honest feedback, and no way to talk your way out of a bad result.
Teaching skiing in particular has been unexpectedly useful at work. Explaining something technical to someone who is cold, slightly scared and not interested in the theory is excellent practice for explaining a model to a production team on a Tuesday morning.
The rest is just that I like being outside.
Currently looking for the next problem worth solving.
Industrial AI, manufacturing data, computer vision, generative AI — or anything where engineering and machine learning have to meet in production. If that sounds like your team, I would like to hear about it.
Mauren, Liechtenstein