👋 Hey there, I'm Max Layer!

I build and write about interesting things.

I'm an entrepreneur, engineer and educator from Hamburg, Germany. I'm currently building up a portfolio of companies with friends at unbounded ltd. At lingonook.com we build the next generation of language learning apps. At ganzda.de we aim to bring meditation practice to the German market. At gradefa.st and schnellkorrigiert.de we help teachers save valuable time spent on corrections. If you need help building your own startup or seek a technical partner, feel free to reach out to me. I'm always looking for interesting conversations and collaborations.

Sharing what I know, one layer at a time.

If you have a startup operating in the AI/ML space, chances are I can help you grow it. My consulting work is centered around solving complex data science and engineering problems, as well as technical writing.

As an engineer, I specialize in deep learning and its applications and I can build ML solutions and data products from first prototype to production. I'm a prolific open source contributor. As Ray andDL4J core developer, Keras contributor , Hyperopt maintainer and author of a range of open source libraries, I have a distinct view on machine learning engineering and the data science ecosystem.

I've written several machine learning books, including "Learning Ray" with O'Reilly and "Deep Learning and the Game of Go" with Manning . I teach data science and engineering at the university level, and I'm a Coursera instructor.

Why the name, Max Layer?

Well, my actual name is Max Pumperla. I got married more than 10 years ago, and I came this close to taking the name of my wife, "Layer". In hindsight, this would have been a cool move. I work in machine learning, and the initials not only spell ML, the name also evokes associations with technical terms like "max pooling layer". To compensate for it, I'm adopting Max Layer as my pen name on the internet now. It's the batman to my Bruce Wayne. It's a little gimicky, but I like it and it makes for a good theme. In fact, I might just go back and change my name for real at some point.