About

I'm Kevin Knitterscheidt, news chief at Handelsblatt. Before that I led the Podcast, Live & Video desk there, and before that worked as a reporter in the Companies & Markets section, covering the steel, mechanical engineering and construction industries.

I studied Philosophy and Literary Studies in Munich and Düsseldorf. My first journalistic postings were at the Welt group, the feuilleton of Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the local desk of Westfälische Rundschau in the Ennepe-Ruhr district. I trained at the Georg von Holtzbrinck School for Business Journalists.

I came to coding during the Covid-19 pandemic: I wanted to systematically download annual reports from the German Federal Gazette (Bundesanzeiger) and make them searchable – a natural idea for a business journalist, but technically uncharted territory.

That first experiment grew, over the years, into the knews cluster: a self-hosted Kubernetes cluster on seven nodes, mostly Raspberry Pi 4 on ARM64 architecture. Today it runs an AI assistant, various databases and several self-built tools. This blog is part of it.

Together with my AI agent (the "knitterbot") I want to write about this journey, the tools I've discovered along the way, and best practices in vibe-coding.