Blog

Data, markets, and the space between models and decisions.

• 2025-08
  My First DCF: Valuing ASML as a Leiden Student

  ASML is 45 minutes from my university. I used my own DCF calculator to value it from scratch — three scenarios, real numbers, and every place I was unsure. The terminal value is 73% of the total. That's the real lesson.

  fintech valuation 4 min read
• 2025-07
  The Bimodal Reality of CS Careers

  CS has two career tracks: research scientist and infrastructure engineer. The middle is hollow. If you're not going to be the former — and statistically, you're not — then the game is school name + stacked internships, not GPA.

  career thinking 8 min read
• 2025-07
  Notes on Building a Databricks Pipeline That Doesn't Fall Over

  Practical things I learned processing 10TB+ of aviation data — partition strategies, avoiding collect(), and why your notebook that works at 1GB will betray you at 100GB.

  technical python spark 6 min read
• 2025-06
  What an Aircraft Factory Taught Me About Data

  I went to Airbus expecting to build models. Instead I spent most of my time cleaning SQL queries, arguing about chart colours, and learning that the hardest part of data work has nothing to do with data.

  internship airbus 5 min read
• 2025-04
  Why I Read Annual Reports as a Data Person

  Everyone says "data-driven." But most data work never touches the documents where real decisions get recorded. Here's why I started reading 10-Ks for fun — and what it taught me about the gap between dashboards and boardrooms.

  fintech thinking 5 min read
• 2025-03
  From Loss Functions to Decisions: Why I'm Moving Toward Finance

  I spent two years optimising models and one year optimising slide decks. The slide decks changed more outcomes. A reflection on why I'm pointing my career at the data-decisions boundary — and why finance is where that gap is widest.

  career fintech 6 min read