Peter Wielander

I'm a Staff Software Engineer and Tech Lead for Minerva Project's emerging products, striving to make active-learning the norm in higher-ed classrooms. In my free time I obsess about language learning, machine learning, education, movement, nutrition, and fitness.

I belief frugality is a virtue, and all one needs in life is to engage physically, engage mentally, and engage emotionally. As proof of this, I've been living out of a backpack since 2020.

  • Blog How to self-study Japanese I often get asked how I learned Japanese and how I would recommend learning Japanese, so I condensed my responses into a brief guide.
  • Blog How to self-study Mandarin I often get asked how I learned Mandarin and how I would recommend learning Mandarin, so I condensed my responses into a brief guide.
  • Blog Heuristics for fitness Guidelines about fitness from 2+ years of research, 10+ years of personal exercise experience, and 1+ years of coaching experience.
  • Blog My history with food Nobody can truly try every diet there is, but I feel like I've covered a large spectrum in my life. This is a history of all of my diets, my changing beliefs, my mistakes, and my wins.
  • Blog My Library Essentially my goodreads account in summary. An incomplete list of books that I've read, chunked by year, scored by how glad I am to have read them.
  • Blog Alcohol, Caffeine, Addiction and Art Why is alcohol so popular? Why is coffee an art? Why do so few people bake bread? Some thoughts.
  • Blog My guiding principles An attempt at identifying the values that I live by (or try to). Recently re-touched. Something changes every year...
  • Blog About Food and Culture Thoughts on the estrangement of health and food, how culture can be good, and bad, and how science is often misunderstood.
  • Blog The mountains of my mind My first public attempt at creative writing, inspired by a week in the mountains and countless cycling trips. An attempt at making a story engaging by putting prose over content.
  • Blog Reading notes: The science of (language) learning This is a summary of "The Science of Learning: Mechanisms and Principles" by Stephen M. Kosslyn, extended with thoughts on how each concept can be applied to language learning. This should serve as a checklist for points to think about when creating a language learning product.
  • Web Code RealPhabet Tool to learn and practice reading alphabets of different languages. Currently supports full lessons on Hindi, and can be used to review Japanese (Hiragana). Aside from a visual redesign, no new features are expected to be released.
  • Blog Reading notes: Thinking Fast and Slow A summary of all the conversational examples of biases and fallacies covered in Kahnemann's classic. I've chosen to only extract the conversational examples, as these are easiest to review for memorization purposes, and are closest to real world problems that may invoke associations with the content from the book.
  • Web Code Motitab A browser extension that replaces your new tab screen with a counter of your age, ticking up the seconds. I have a theory that you can separate people into two groups, based on whether this makes you anxious or motivates you. I'm not sure which one I'm in anymore.
  • Web Code QuarksJS Animation library for creating quark animations. I don't actually know what the animation type is called, if anyone knows please tell me. I made this to try to replicate a fancy loading animation I once saw in a custom version of KDE Plasma.
  • Code WikiQuick Browser extension that allows you to double click on a word to display a Wikipedia preview card. Useful for quickly looking up proper names, places, references etc. Very much made obsolete on MacOS by the "triple click" or CMD+CTRL+D click that includes wikipedia lookups. It would be nice to record lookups and allow adding them to an SRS system, but I never got around to it.
  • Blog Code How not to write a blog This post talks about the motivation for starting a blog, the technological choices I made when creating it, my interests, and what you can expect to see here in the future.
  • Web Code Solitaire Lightweight browser-based implementation of Klondike Solitaire. I think I botched the rules when coding it, so it might be a tad harder than the original. Message me if you manage to complete it, you'll get a virtual cookie.