Personal Software
How to Build Personal Software: A Practical First-Tool Guide
Build a small tool for one recurring task, with a reusable brief and checks for storage, recovery, and daily use.
Engineering notes9posts
Blog
Notes on personal software, local AI, and the engineering behind useful tools.
Personal Software
A Searchable X Bookmark Archive: How I Built Birdbrain
Inside Birdbrain: capturing X bookmarks, searching saved posts, and separating local storage from hosted AI.
Personal Software
What Is Personal Software? Why I Build Tools for Myself
What personal software means, why it matters now, and five tools I built around my own routines.
Product
Stone vs Obsidian vs Granola: A Local, Open-Source Alternative
An honest comparison of Stone with Obsidian and Granola. Where an open-source, local-first notes app with on-device meeting transcription fits, and where the other two are the better choice.
Architecture
Hybrid Search in SQLite: FTS5, Embeddings, and Rank Fusion
How to build hybrid search in SQLite — FTS5 full-text plus embeddings, merged with reciprocal rank fusion and a cross-encoder reranker — while plain Markdown files stay the only durable data.
AI/LLM
whisper.cpp Meeting Transcription: Fixing Echo, Hallucinations, and Loops
How to transcribe meetings fully offline on a Mac with whisper.cpp — two audio tracks, echo cancellation with delay compensation, and how to stop Whisper hallucinating on silence or looping the same phrase.
Product
Stone: A Local-First Markdown Note-Taking App for Mac
Stone is a free, open-source note-taking app for Mac that keeps notes, journals, tasks, and meeting transcripts as plain Markdown files on your own disk. Here is what it does and who it is for.
Infrastructure
Processing 2,000 Hours of Media a Day with Celery and Redis
What running a video dubbing pipeline at 2K hours of daily content taught me about queue design, acks_late, the Redis visibility timeout, and where a 50% speedup actually comes from.
AI/LLM
Scaling LLM Applications: Context, Queues, and the Cost of Personalization
What 100K+ daily requests and AI workflows for 1,000+ businesses taught me about context selection, asynchronous execution, cost, and quality.