Education leave rocked my work — Waldo Vanderhaeghen

I signed up to learn. I did not expect to ship.

Five days, remote. A Generative KI mit Python Bildungsurlaub — Python, RAG pipelines, LangChain agents, vector databases, local LLMs. I wanted to understand how this stuff actually worked under the hood.

On day four, while the instructor was covering RAG, I opened a new project folder. By Friday I had a working app: describe a film plot in plain text, get back structured results — director, cast, release year, trailer — via LangChain, Groq, and Pydantic output parsing. It took an afternoon. I hadn’t planned to build anything that week. It just became obvious that I could.

At work

I stopped waiting for engineering capacity. I built a performance analysis tool that now guides decision-making for customer success.

I think differently about roadmaps — because I can now feel the difference between what’s genuinely hard, what’s trivially automatable, and where an afternoon with an agent replaces a sprint. The campaign review pipeline I built after the course would have been a multi-month project before it. It was three weeks of evenings.

My default laptop mode shifted too. Jira, Google Docs, and Slack used to be the whole screen. Now it’s terminals. The tools changed because what I’m doing changed.

Personally

The projects I would have abandoned half-finished before now get shipped. The Robot Cooks Drawings app. The tax automation. The Claude Code build process. The campaign analysis. None of those felt completable before the course. Now they’re live.

The week didn’t teach me to code. It taught me what I was actually capable of building. That turns out to be a much bigger shift.