I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store.

Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got!

Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).

Not OP, but I’m running local models on a M1 Max as well with 64GB RAM.

It varies by model, but I’m getting 50-60 t/s with Qwen 3.6 35B and Qwen 3 coder 30B.

I’ve also used Qwen 3.8 27B but I get 10t/s on it.

It’s useable in some use cases, but I rely mostly on my $20 Claude subscription.

Try 3.8 27B in MTPLX; I get about 30 tok/s with the same hardware as you. (Although it does use around 90-95W of power, compared to the ~60W that 3.6 35B-A3B uses to generate 55 tok/s. That’s about 3 J/tok instead of 1.)

That's so cool. I wonder if the regular M5 can run those models too.

I run qwen 3.8 27b on my m5 mbp, with 48gb of unified ram and I’m getting around 10-15 tok/s.

3.6 35b a3b, I’m getting upwards of 100

I was interested in learning more about reverse image search, so I built audioguide.london. It’s a simple image search where you take a photo of an artwork in a gallery, tries to ID it and returns a pre-generated audio and a link to the museum website.

The audios were all generated locally, essentially looking at the contents of the website, running it through a LLM to generate a script and Kokoro for TTS.

I’ve built it as an app for myself almost a year ago, so I deployed it as a vibe coded website in here: https://audioguide.london/

As mentioned before, I think Apple hardware is the best alternative right now.

Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, you can find even some used ones with enough RAM that will run models like Qwen reasonably well.

I'm using a M1 Max MacBook Pro and it runs Qwen 3.5 on Ollama (without MLX) at a decent speed.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

> A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

I agree. But a URL shortener with a twist isn’t just fun, it’s funny. The joke—as opposed to the usefulness—is what’s interesting about it. But when the same joke is overdone, it’s no longer funny.

> building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46632329

Loved the idea!

VictorSantiago.me

Only actual update I do is to change my title / company when I change jobs, otherwise it's just a landing page to link to my GH, LinkedIn, etc. No blogs or anything exciting.

When AWS released the S3 Vectors last year, I wanted to try it since I had no experience with Vector DBs, so I built a simple audioguide app to play around with it.

Basically, just use it to identify artworks from a photo, then return a pre-generated AI-Audio for that artwork based on the data on their site. I put up a basic live version on my site for The National Gallery in London: https://victorsantiago.me/audioguide/national_gallery.html

(If you want to try it, you can open it on your phone and take a picture of some painting on the National Gallery Website, e.g.: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/vincent-van-gog... )

It was pretty fun to try it out and play with different LLMs and TTS models to generate the output. Might make a it a proper web app some time soon!

Are you able to sponsor visa? Already based in London, but would need visa to switch jobs.

The way you put it, looks like IBM is a pretty good place to work at

Aside from having like 9 managers, 8 of whom are totally purposeless in your professional life, then yeah it’s not bad. The benefits are good.

I worked with some pretty talented and dedicated people at IBM. The “hop on a 2am call to put out a fire because they happened to check their email and they owed the person on pager duty a beer” kind of people.

That company was a red tape rats nest, but that’s management’s fault. And you get lazy people or shit departmental culture at various points in nearly every company, but painting a tens-of-thousands strong workforce with that brush is ridiculous.

Sounds miserable if you like solving real problems.