Posts on Christoph Pröschel

Building the Fastest Python CI

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 12:09:04 +0000

Learn how to build a blazingly fast Python CI pipeline using uv, pex, and Grog. This post shows how to combine uv’s dependency caching with pex’s executable bundling to achieve sub-second build times in Python monorepos. We’ll explore techniques for dependency resolution, cross-platform builds, and efficient Docker packaging - all while keeping the setup lightweight and maintainable.

Grog

Sun, 01 Jun 2025 12:50:00 +0100

Based on my learnings and frustrations with tools like Bazel or Pants I created my own monorepo build tool, Grog. Grog centers pragmatism and simplicity in its design. Learn more about it in “Why Grog?”.

Python monorepo with uv and pex

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 15:09:04 +0000

Read the latest version of this blog post: Building the fastest Python CI

With the current hype in AI it has become quite hard to avoid writing python and shipping it at scale. Unfortunately, the python packaging and environment system is so notoriously convoluted that there is even an infamous xkcd comic about it.

Enter uv, the rising star of the python community that has succeeded in solving all these problems while also being significantly more performant. But while uv is great at managing your python environment it does not yet have a clear answer for how to bundle and ship them.

Master Thesis: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Climate Policy Games

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 16:34:25 +0100

View the full thesis here.

Abstract

Despite concerted efforts by researchers and policymakers, governments are failing to implement the global coordination needed to implement policies that could avert the disaster of unmitigated climate change. Existing economic models are often ill-equipped to capture the complexities of dynamic, strategic interactions among multiple agents. The research on international mechanisms such as climate clubs, for instance, is often limited to one-shot games due to the combinatorial explosion of sequential negotiation steps. Addressing this gap, this thesis leverages state-of-the-art multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms evaluated on the Rice-N integrated assessment model (IAM). The first approach evaluates the efficacy of the meta-learning opponent-shaping algorithm, ‘Shaper’, in exploiting the learning dynamics of other agents to outperform them in a competitive climate policy setting. Even though Shaper performs well on new economic games introduced here and cooperates in self-play, it fails to achieve the same results on Rice-N. Secondly, the meta-learning ‘Good Shepherd’ algorithm trains a policy that tunes the mitigation efforts and tariff of a climate club that other agents can join or leave unilaterally. This approach produces club structures based on several climate and economic objectives that align with the literature while yielding a novel perspective on dynamic club participation. While these results overall suggest a strong use case for the application of MARL to climate policy, more research into both algorithms and economic models is needed, as well as an interdisciplinary alignment on terminology and goals.

Lab Grown Meat Is Not a Climate Solution

Sun, 17 Sep 2023 11:20:02 +0200

Few topics spark as much controversy in the climate debate as the assertion that we need to cut our meat consumption if we want to reach our climate targets. On some primal level going for the burger on your plate is a much more outrageous act than going for your car. So it’s no surprise that technical-minded people have been looking for a panacea in the form of lab-grown meat. And the pitch is alluring: If the plan works out the burger is safe and we get to reduce our emissions. We get to have our cake and eat it, too.

Viper Paper Implementation

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 20:38:36 +0200

In this article I talk about the implementation of the paper “Verifiable Reinforcement Learning via Policy Extraction” by Osbert Bastani et al.

Rasa L3 presentation: Supercharging Conversational AI with Human Agent Feedback Loops

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 16:34:25 +0100

Here I talk about how to get the most out of your conversational AI and customer support by having your AI suggest likely responses and then training it on the selection that customer support makes.

Links:

Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCXumfwcmXE
Implementation Blog post: How to level up your customer support and AI using Airy and Rasa X

Airy

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 12:50:00 +0100

From 2019 to 2022 I had the pleasure of working on Airy, an “Open Source App Framework to build streaming apps with real-time data.” [sic]. At its core Airy is a cluster of Kafka Streams applications and frontends that allow you to connect to messaging sources (e.g. Slack, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and build streaming applications on top of them.

Free IEA Data

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 12:50:00 +0100

This is a small project that I started in 2021 to make the data from the International Energy Agency (IEA) freely available to everyone.

You can read more about the motivation behind it in this thread: https://twitter.com/chrismatisch/status/1459872989751787521

Covid-19 Hackathon write up

Thu, 26 Mar 2020 10:49:43 +0000

My experiences and thoughts on the WirVsVirus Hackathon and the Covid-19 infection reporting process in Germany.

Struggling with script integrations.

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 14:14:04 +0000

You are building a product and you want to move fast. But you can’t just launch your MVP without auxiliary tools to help you learn and grow it. You will want to track visitors to understand, where they are coming from, track users to understand how they are using your product and can you really call it a landing page, without a Newsletter Subscription Button and an obnoxious chat window popping up?

Dropout to build a startup? Things you should know.

Sat, 24 Nov 2018 13:11:17 +0000

When I started university the “The Social Network” movie had been out only four years. And although this feels like an eternity as far as hype cycles go, you would be hard pressed to find an economics or CS student, who has not fantasized about rising above his peers by hacking together the next game-changing tech solution. And it’s not just some romanticized career path for millennials: Institutions are catching up, too. By the time I founded weview, the Technical University of Munich had completely rebranded itself as an “Entrepreneurial University”.

Weview

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 12:50:00 +0100

Weview was an e-commerce startup that I co-founded in 2015 with Jakob von Egidy and Leopold von Waldthausen. At Weview we sought to improve online shopping by replacing text reviews which are easy to fake with interactive videos. We did so by building a platform that connected content creators with e-commerce brands through an integration on their shop pages. At our peak we had contracts with large brands like MediaMarkt and got accepted into the 2018 Techstars SAP.io cohort in Berlin.