Constantin MetzDeutsch

Software engineer · Munich

Constantin Metz

I build products end to end: the engine, the interface, and the film that launches them.

01 · Zenarios

A financial planner that forecasts a household's money, month by month, for life.

Built alone, from the simulation engine to the App Store listing: tax rules for 38 countries and a whole life in one forecast.

1,000 futures

Then it throws a thousand different markets at the plan.

Fat-tailed returns and drifting inflation, drawn a thousand times, each draw seeded and reproducible. Each line is one future. In 997 of these 1,000, the money lasts.

Real engine output · the app's example household · engine 4.3.0

The Zenarios overview: net worth at retirement and the forecast with its range of market futures

02 · Signals

It notices what Reddit starts talking about before it trends.

Every comment in 37 subreddits, counted like words: a log-odds score for what is rising today, Theil–Sen and Mann–Kendall for what grows over months.

Lead–lag

And it learns which communities talk about things first.

Leader-to-follower edges between subreddits, tested for direction and turned into early warnings, then scored by replaying trends planted in the data.

An illustration · drawn on the real configuration of 37 subreddits

LiveTranslate

And one that listens: a talk, captioned live in three languages.

The browser's microphone streams to Deepgram over a WebSocket, DeepL translates each finished line, and every line types itself out on screen.

A live caption in German, English and Portuguese:Schön, dass ihr da seid.Great to have you here.Que bom que vocês estão aqui.

03 · PaperScores

An AI reviewer that grades medical research before you trust it.

Papers scored 0–100 on six dimensions, with checklists aligned with CONSORT and related standards, and findings that point to the page they came from, where there is one.

  • Methods20
  • Statistics15
  • Transparency10
  • Bias & integrity40
  • External validity30
  • Significance65

A real scorecard: a narrative review, low on methods by design. The paper isn't named.

Overall score: 30/ 100

04 · Origins

It started with a Minecraft server network.

At school I built its web services: a component library, key redemption, and the sign-in.

OpenID Connect

One sign-in for the forum, the website and the game.

A hand-rolled OpenID Connect provider on the forum's legacy XenForo accounts: consent screens, rate limits, a key pair per client and signed RS256 tokens.

Open source

Then Sequelize: on the maintainers team as it moved to TypeScript.

Reviews, typings, and #13710, which moved the library's errors to TypeScript: +731 −616 across 41 files.

05 · History

Self-taught, and shipping since school.

A first engineering job at 18, senior a year later, and products end to end since. The full story, with names, is on the history page.

  1. EarlyHTML, CSS, JavaScript; Java for Minecraft mods
  2. 2018Internships during school: Django, Angular
  3. 2020First engineering job: React widgets, Storybook, CMS sites
  4. 2021Senior engineer: an offline-capable PWA for in-store kiosks
  5. 2023Marketplace apps for Jira: React, Node, .NET, an Nx monorepo
  6. 2026AI quoting for industry at a YC startup; Zenarios ships

That's the thread

Constantin Metz, software engineer in Munich.

More things I've built

Smaller projects, each with a write-up.

  • Lexicon Bluff

    A real-time party game for phones: one player holds a rare word's real definition, everyone else writes a fake.

    2026TypeScript · React 19 · Vite

    lexicon.pergata.com
  • CarCost Germany

    A total-cost-of-ownership calculator for cars in Germany: cash, loan or lease, company-car tax and break-even.

    2026TypeScript · React 19 · Vite

  • Travel cost calculator

    A trip budget planner with what-if scenarios, where GPT-5 suggests the cost items and plain code does the maths.

    2026TypeScript · React 18 · Vite

  • segno

    A Deno port of validator.js from 2020: 73 string validators with TypeScript types, tests, docs and releases.

    2020TypeScript · Deno · Deno std

    segno.js.org

All work

Writing

How the thread works, and other notes.

  • How the Thread works

    One line of light through 3D space, driven by native scroll: the raw WebGL2 renderer, the camera and the data behind the metz.uk home page.

    Draft9 min read

  • Building an OpenID Connect server at 18

    Christmas 2019: single sign-on for a Minecraft network, on its forum's accounts. What it needed, what I built in three weeks, what held up, and how I'd grow it today.

    Draft6 min read

  • 1,000 market futures in a pure-TS engine

    How Zenarios simulates up to 1,000 market futures on the phone: Student-t returns, AR(1) inflation, a seeded generator per trial and US market history.

    Draft9 min read

All writing