My perfect Berlin weekend
“My perfect Berlin weekend” was a regular feature in Exberliner, the English-language city magazine. I was never famous enough to be asked to do one, so I’m writing up my own here to accompany my Berlin guide.
ines.io
I’m a software developer working on Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing technologies, and the co-founder and CEO of Explosion, makers of spaCy, one of the leading open-source libraries for NLP, Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for machine learning, and Ellf, a virtual assistant for agentic NLP development.
Latest posts
My Year in Review 2025
On my birthday, I want to take the time again to look back at the past year, including travel, talks, writing and various things I did and enjoyed.
My Guide to Australia
I've spent quite a bit of time in Australia over the years, so this post is an ongoing collection of places I liked in Melbourne and Sydney.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 7: Resources and tools list
My ultimate collection of everything you need for your slides, from design assets to presentation tools.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 6: Community showcase
Part 6 of my slides series showcases more examples from the community for inspiration, with details on the design, aesthetic and creation process.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 5: Sharing your presentations
What’s next, now that you’ve given a successful presentation with beautiful slides? For part 5, I’ve collected tips for how to share your slides with the world.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 4: Design elements and inspiration
Part 4 of this series dives deeper into the little details and examples of visual design elements you can use to implement your talk’s aesthetic.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 3: Technical content
In part 3 of this series, I share some tips and inspiration for presenting technical content in your slides and making “boring” topics more fun and engaging.
My Year in Review 2024
2024 was an eventful but also difficult year for me. This is my personal summary, including travel, talks, writing and various things I did and enjoyed.
The Window-Knocking Machine Test
How will technology shape our world going forward? And what tools and products should we build? When imagining what the future could look like, it helps to look back in time and compare past visions to our reality today.
Making beautiful slides for your talks, part 2: All about aesthetics
After I published my guide to making beautiful slides, I got a lot of great feedback and I especially loved that others had already used it for their talks. In this post, I want to showcase two examples from the community, as well as my most recent talk, and dive deeper into the aesthetics and slide design process.
Three transformative tools: a review of my favourite apps
There’s this feeling of joy and excitement you sometimes get when you start using a new tool, discover the little details that make a product great and feel the rush of motivation and new ideas that comes with it. It’s what I’ve always aspired to do with our products, too, and it’s what motivated this blog post.
A beginner’s guide to making beautiful slides for your talks
I love designing slides for my talks, so here are some of my not-so-secret secrets and three beginner-friendly steps for how you can up your slides game.
My Guide to Berlin
My personal favourites, tips and recommendations for where to go and what to do in my home city.
Raspberry Pi, Python and cats: my first foray into embedded development
I love shitty robots. And I love Python, and cats.
Building Prodigy: Our new tool for efficient machine teaching
Prodigy is a project very dear to my heart and seeing it come to life has been one of the most exciting experiences as a software developer so far.
Reflections on running spaCy: commercial open-source NLP
As more and more people and companies are getting involved with open-source software, balancing the expectations of an open community and a traditional provider vs. consumer relationship is becoming increasingly difficult.
The wired brain: How not to talk about an AI-powered future
The way we talk about AI is a mess. It starts with the most obvious, the imagery.
Story time: How I started coding
I've seen a couple of these posts pop up over the past year or so, and I've always enjoyed reading other people's stories. So here's mine.
Announcing Explosion AI
Today, we launched the website for our new company, Explosion AI. Explosion is a digital studio specialising in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing.
I fell for self-help so you don’t have to
I hate to admit it, but during my late teenage years and the beginning of my adult life, I massively fell for self-help blogs.
5 things I learned from working in print
For four years, I worked for a popular print magazine.