First supporting our friend Jamaican-Caribbean friend Sutanya (aka Dinner For One) who held a pop-up residency at Comptoir Sur Mer, a local seafood establishment next to the Canal St Martin — she was co-hosting along with another fellow caribbean cheffe and we had a blast discovering these incredible flavors.
Next up: a pit stop at Buddy Buddy, a place I’d been waiting to try for a while, which happened to be just a bloc behind the restaurant.
And later: a long walk with my wife & daughter to head home on foot :)
I’ve been thinking about using AI tools in more practical, personal ways for a while now. Not for everything. But for the right things. Somewhere between curiosity and necessity, I started building a handful of small guides for myself over the past few months, and I wanted to document how that happened. —## It started with ParisI’ve had a list of Paris recommendations for quite a while now. Over the past few years, it took the form of a shared Apple Notes folder, organized with different lists of recommendations. Coffee spots, restaurants, neighborhoods — the kind of stuff friends and family ask about whenever they visit us or simply travel here. I used to just send long texts or emails. Later it took the form of this Apple Notes folder with different notes inside of it, and direct links to Apple Maps. It worked, but it wasn’t great.So I sat down and tried something: I dumped everything I knew into a conversation with Claude, described what kind of places I actually care about (neighborhood spots, good coffee, no tourist traps), and asked it to help me structure everything into something I could actually send people. A few iterations later, I had a clean, navigable HTML page I could just… link to.Honestly? It’s one of the most useful things I’ve made. I’ve shared it probably a dozen times since, with friends & family.The key was being specific. I wasn’t asking it to “make a Paris guide.” I was telling it: here are the places I like, here’s the vibe I’m going for, here’s who this is for. It responded to that. Then I asked it to organize it as a simple static html file to upload to my own website. And then I refined it over time (light mode/dark mode, direct links to Apple Maps, etc.) You can view the guide as it stands now at tibz.blog/Paris—## Then came BerlinEarlier this month, we took a trip to Berlin over Easter — me, Shana, and our daughter. It coincided with a work trip to the Berlin office during the following week. Family travel with a toddler is its own kind of planning challenge, even when our daughter is already pretty easy and well-traveled: you need stroller-friendly neighborhoods, nap-window logistics, coffee that doesn’t suck, food that works for all three of us.I used the same approach as Paris. Described our situation, what we needed, what we didn’t want. The type of vibes we were after, the neighborhoods we were curious about. The output was a proper guide organized by neighborhood and day — built into an HTML page, hosted on my blog, so I could pull it up from my phone mid-trip.Then after we got back, I did something I hadn’t planned on: I went back into it and asked Claude to turn it into a record or log of what we actually did. Swapped the recommendations for the places we really went to, updated the itinerary to reflect how the days actually played out. Now it reads less like a planning doc and more like a trip log.Both versions felt useful in their own way. And the whole process — planning to debrief — was maybe a couple of hours of back and forth spread over a few days. This one is available at tibz.blog/berlinberlin.html V1 berlin.html V2, the final, updated version after coming back from the trip.—## Coffee time!I upgraded my home setup recently (added a scale — game changer), and realized I kept mentally holding a lot of knowledge about my own coffee setup that I’d never actually written down. What grind works on the Dedica versus the V60. How hard water affects extraction. When to descale.So I built a small reference guide. Just for me. Not a tutorial, not a how-to — just my own setup, documented in a useful way. It lives somewhere I can actually find it when I need it, instead of Googling the same thing for the third time.Small thing. But satisfying. Tibz.blog/coffee—## And finally, fitnessI run a few times a week. I play basketball on Thursdays. I have a yoga mat and two dumbbells at home. That’s the full setup.I wanted a weekly routine that actually reflected my life — not some generic program assuming I have a gym, infinite time, or perfect knees. I described my habits, my goals (upper body improvements, building running volume gradually, staying knee-conscious), and what I was working with. The plan I got back was something I could realistically follow, which is rare.I’ve used it more consistently than anything else I’ve tried. Probably because it was built around my actual situation. tibz.blog/workout—## The final touch: open instantly from my phoneAs a last touch, I made sure to create dedicated Shortcuts from my phone’s control center, using Shortcuts: that way, in one-tap I can easily reach for the Coffee guide when I’m still waking up, or change and get ready to workout with very little time-related friction, seconds away from starting my workout.—## What I noticedThe first version of each of these was never the final version. Always needed at least two or three rounds to get it to feel right. The more honest and specific I was about what I wanted — and what I didn’t want — the better the result.I also stopped framing it as “using AI to do a task” somewhere along the way. It felt more like thinking out loud and having something help me structure it. The knowledge was already there. I just needed a way to get it out of my head and into something useful.That part I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did. Nerdy useful things.
I just came back from a short weeklong trip to Berlin. I was technically there for work. Our team at ITONICS used the Berlin office for our Quarterly Business Review — sales, account management, the full group. Berlin doesn’t look like anywhere else in Western Europe, and that’s not by accident. This is a city that was destroyed and rebuilt twice in a hundred years. Forget the Parisian Haussmannian style — what you get instead is a patchwork of eras, textures, and gaps. Empty lots next to Soviet-era blocks next to glass towers next to community gardens. It shouldn’t work. But in this city, it kind of does. Part of what makes it feel different is who the city has attracted since the Wall came down. Affordable rents, squatted buildings, a low cost of living for three decades — that pulled in artists, weirdos, and creatives from everywhere. It shows. The street art, the tattoos, everyone dressed head-to-toe in black with a leather jacket — it’s not a cliché, it’s just what Berlin looks like. I’ve only felt something close to it in San Francisco, and obviously this has changed a lot since the Sixties. Apparently Portland has this vibe too, though I wouldn’t know. After a couple of rough months at work since the end of last year, seeing everyone in person was more than welcome. We’re lucky to have a genuinely solid department, managers included. That part was good.But I’d planned it as a family trip from the start. Shana and Azul came with me. It was a great call to make. —– The thing that crystallised Berlin for me was Tempelhofer Feld. A decommissioned airport — runways, hangars, the whole footprint — that the city voted to keep as open public space in 2014. No development, no monetisation. Just an enormous field in the middle of the city where people run, cycle, fly kites, and exist. Azul ran across a runway. The scale of it doesn’t translate until you’re standing there. Neither does what it says about how Berlin thinks about public space — that you can take a 380-hectare airport in the middle of a capital city and just leave it empty for people. The personal highlight was different. Élodie has been my best friend since we were 14 — over 20 years. She lives in Berlin now, with her fiancé Daniele. They just got engaged. We met at a park so my daughter could run around, then went back to theirs for pizzas and a long evening of laughter and deeper conversations. These past few years, with life moving fast on both sides, it’s been harder to stay connected. That evening reminded me why the connection is still there. It also meant that my daughter could finally meet them, and they finally met her.
One big thing we noticed while walking as a young family: parks and playgrounds, everywhere, constantly. Élodie and Daniele explained it later — after the war, building a park or a playground was cheaper than constructing a building, so the city ended up densely seeded with green space almost by default. The practical result is a city that works well with a stroller. And one detail I hadn’t seen since growing up in France in the early 90s: all the playgrounds have sand. Actual sand, not rubber or plastic matting. My daughter was delighted. My wife and I less so — we had so much sand to remove from the stroller, our shoes and socks, and left all over the hotel rooms (😬😅). Another small-er highlight: attending game 2 of the Basketball Champions League quarterfinals between Alba Berlin, the local team, and Unicaja Malaga. Alba was relocated to the older Max-Schmeling-Halle, due to the German League Ice Hockey semi-final being played at the newer Uber Arena. But still: 7450 people showed up, including all 11 of us from work. We had a blast seeing the talented young star Jack Kayil take over in the second half, and, despite a loss, Berlin was able to get back in to the game and force an overtime.
—–
On Easter Monday, we went to the Dong Xuan Center in Lichtenberg — an enormous Vietnamese wholesale market with food stalls, shops, and a specific kind of energy that’s hard to describe if you haven’t been. We stayed for about an hour and a half, walked around, had lunch and a coffee. I’m French of Vietnamese descent; my grandfather came from Vietnam as a second-class citizen, brought to help rebuild France after the Second World War.
My wife Shana is American of Vietnamese descent; her mother came to the US as a refugee from Saigon in the mid-70s. Both family histories are charged. And yet both of us have been able to navigate the Vietnamese community in France, in the US, and in Vietnam itself — to move between those worlds with a degree of ease, cultural fluency, and, on both sides, openness. We were not prepared for what we found at Dong Xuan.
In Paris, if you visit the 13th arrondissement, you know the kind of place: all ethnicities mixing, including a lot of people of Asian descent who grew up in France, whose parents or grandparents came from Vietnam or Cambodia or elsewhere, who’ve found partners from different communities, built lives in between. There’s a visible exchange. In the US it’s similar — the Vietnamese-American community is deeply embedded in the broader culture, and that creates a certain permeability. At Dong Xuan it was different. Vietnamese people were with other Vietnamese people. Other communities were there too, but separately, in their own groups. Nobody much mixing. It wasn’t unfriendly exactly — just distinctly closed. Two cultures that are both known for being reserved, existing in parallel rather than together.
I went looking for reasons afterwards. The history of the Vietnamese community in Germany is genuinely distinct: most came not as refugees or immigrants chasing opportunity, but as contract workers sent by the Vietnamese government to the GDR in the 1980s under bilateral labour agreements. They arrived in a country that was itself closed, transactional, not built for integration. When the Wall fell and Germany reunified, many stayed — but the social fabric that might have opened things up never fully formed. The community turned inward.
What we saw at Dong Xuan makes more sense in that light.This is not a judgment. It’s an observation — one that surprised us both precisely because we thought we knew what Vietnamese community spaces felt like. Berlin just had a different answer.
—–
On the question of mixing a work trip with family: I was genuinely alone for maybe one full day and the two evenings around that. We were together for the majority of the time — split during work hours, but regrouping in the afternoon and evening, sharing what we’d each done. S and The Baby™️ explored freely while I worked. Shana found the Dussmann bookstore on her own — five floors of culture, open until midnight, she was very happy to discover it. I planned the days off in advance so nobody was just sitting around waiting. It felt like sharing an experience rather than one person traveling while the other one stays behind with a toddler. That distinction matters more than I expected it to.
A few other things worth noting.
People talk about Parisians being rude — we genuinely have nothing on Berliners, at least around strollers and public transit. In Paris there’s an unspoken consideration for young parents: people hold elevator doors, let you off trains first, make space. In Berlin it was consistently the opposite. People would cut in front of us to get into a lift they could have walked, rush train doors instead of letting us through. Not everyone, but enough to be a pattern.
Smoking was another surprise. Germany has a lower smoking rate than France statistically — around 20% versus 25% — but Berlin feels smokier than Paris. The reason, apparently, is that Berlin still allows indoor smoking in some venues at the state level, which the rest of Germany doesn’t. Combined with the fact that most of our friends in Paris don’t smoke, the smell was noticeable. Around bars especially.
One last thing: cash. Germany has a reputation. I budgeted €100 for three people across a week and barely used it — a handful of small vendors, that’s it. Everything else by card or Apple Pay. Either the reputation is outdated, or Berlin runs differently from the rest of the country. Probably both.
—–
Berlin’s the kind of city you don’t fully understand on a first visit. But you get enough. It took me until my second time, 13 years later, to get a much better grasp on it.
Seven years ago this month, my wife and I had just moved to Paris as a pair of newlyweds — I’d found a job. Today I had an errand to run on the same street where that first Parisian office used to be.
We spent about a year and a half there. Enough time to build routines — the restaurant next door for lunch, the bar around the corner for after-work drinks with colleagues.
Going back felt strange in a good way. The street has changed — new lunch spots, new offices — but the vibe is the same. It just keeps renewing itself every few years.
What hit me more was thinking about the distance we’ve covered. From fresh-off-the-boat Parisians to actually feeling at home here. My wife and I, and now us as a family.
Seven years ago this month, my wife and I had just moved to Paris as a pair of newlyweds — I’d found a job. Today I had an errand to run on the same street where that first Parisian office used to be.
We spent about a year and a half there. Enough time to build routines — the restaurant next door for lunch, the bar around the corner for after-work drinks with colleagues.
Going back felt strange in a good way. The street has changed — new lunch spots, new offices — but the vibe is the same. It just keeps renewing itself every few years.
What hit me more was thinking about the distance we’ve covered. From fresh-off-the-boat Parisians to actually feeling at home here. My wife and I, and now us as a family.
Same street. Different people walking it.
As I was running my errand(s), I took myself out to lunch, in one of my favorite street food places in town, a place that means a lot to my wife & I.
Loved reading about the people behind the movement. Been hearing about most of these places and have them all in my ever-expanding list of places to try :)
In Nuremberg for work for the week, and decided to go check out the local football team with some of my colleagues.
We were seated next to the Berlin fans, and unfortunately, the stadium has a running track around it, which I generally really dislike. But other than that fun atmosphere and frustrating experience to watch the home team lose 0-3. Good experience if they were playing better, I would try to go see that more regularly considering I am visiting this town four times a year.
Greater Paris is born, reconfiguring the city. (…) The east (…) [side] has risen, turning the banlieue from Pantin to Romainville into cool, desirable areas. (…) The action is no longer on the Seine River — it is on a 200-year-old canal, the Ourcq.
Went out to Musée de L’Homme for the exhibition on Wax Textile, and would highly recommend it to anyone interested in fashion, colonialism, ethnography, culture, and global trade.
Then had lunch at Schwartz’s Deli before enjoying the sight, and spending time with some of our friends living close to the Eiffel Tower on Rive Droite.
Including delicious cookies and affogatos from Crème and a visit to the National Archives and seeing the official handwritten “Appeal of June 18th” from General Charles De Gaulle, which he broadcast on the BBC from London while in exile, on June 18th 1940, trying to inspire the French to resist their invaders.
Also: Happy International Spritz Day! Grateful that we have a lovely big Eataly here in Paris 🇮🇹
—## Then came BerlinEarlier this month, we took a trip to Berlin over Easter — me, Shana, and our daughter. It coincided with a work trip to the Berlin office during the following week. Family travel with a toddler is its own kind of planning challenge, even when our daughter is already pretty easy and well-traveled: you need stroller-friendly neighborhoods, nap-window logistics, coffee that doesn’t suck, food that works for all three of us.I used the same approach as Paris. Described our situation, what we needed, what we didn’t want. The type of vibes we were after, the neighborhoods we were curious about. The output was a proper guide organized by neighborhood and day — built into an HTML page, hosted on my blog, so I could pull it up from my phone mid-trip.Then after we got back, I did something I hadn’t planned on: I went back into it and asked Claude to turn it into a record or log of what we actually did. Swapped the recommendations for the places we really went to, updated the itinerary to reflect how the days actually played out. Now it reads less like a planning doc and more like a trip log.Both versions felt useful in their own way. And the whole process — planning to debrief — was maybe a couple of hours of back and forth spread over a few days. This one is available at 
—## And finally, fitnessI run a few times a week. I play basketball on Thursdays. I have a yoga mat and two dumbbells at home. That’s the full setup.I wanted a weekly routine that actually reflected my life — not some generic program assuming I have a gym, infinite time, or perfect knees. I described my habits, my goals (upper body improvements, building running volume gradually, staying knee-conscious), and what I was working with. The plan I got back was something I could realistically follow, which is rare.I’ve used it more consistently than anything else I’ve tried. Probably because it was built around my actual situation. 
—## The final touch: open instantly from my phoneAs a last touch, I made sure to create dedicated Shortcuts from my phone’s control center, using Shortcuts: that way, in one-tap I can easily reach for the Coffee guide when I’m still waking up, or change and get ready to workout with very little time-related friction, seconds away from starting my workout.
—## What I noticedThe first version of each of these was never the final version. Always needed at least two or three rounds to get it to feel right. The more honest and specific I was about what I wanted — and what I didn’t want — the better the result.I also stopped framing it as “using AI to do a task” somewhere along the way. It felt more like thinking out loud and having something help me structure it. The knowledge was already there. I just needed a way to get it out of my head and into something useful.That part I didn’t expect to enjoy as much as I did. Nerdy useful things.
