About me

Even as a child I wanted two things at once: to ask questions and to understand how things work. In the mornings I interviewed family and friends with a cassette recorder, in the afternoons I experimented with my first mobile phone, a Nokia 3210. What interested me was less what it could do than why it could do it, and where its limits were.

At school the two didn’t quite fit together. Technology appealed to me, maths didn’t, and there’s no way around maths at a technical high school. So I went to a tourism school, and later my love of language led me to study journalism. Looking back, that was less of a detour than it seemed at the time: to explain technology to others, you first have to translate it for yourself.

I’ve been writing about technology for DER STANDARD for over ten years, with a short detour into marketing. The question of how the things I write about are actually built never went away. In my thirties I took educational leave, did a coding bootcamp and became a developer. It wasn’t easy. The doubt about whether you’re good enough never quite disappears; it just gets quieter over time.

Today I work on forecasts for solar, wind and hydro power at APG, and I still write. More and more of it is about AI. I use AI tools every day, ran Claude Code back when every API call still came out of my own pocket, and test on myself what agents can actually do in everyday life, and where they fall short. Each job sharpens the other: writing teaches me to explain things simply, programming teaches me that they rarely are. I enjoy both, and getting a little better at each of them every day.

(Daniel Koller, Vienna)