# Blog

> Build personal software with practical guides by Kushal Patankar: local AI, searchable notes, X bookmark archives, and the engineering behind them.

Notes on personal software, local AI, and the engineering behind useful tools.

- [How to Build Personal Software: A Practical First-Tool Guide](https://peritissimus.com/blog/how-to-build-personal-software) (2026-10-12, 5 min read): Build a small tool for one recurring task, with a reusable brief and checks for storage, recovery, and daily use.
- [A Searchable X Bookmark Archive: How I Built Birdbrain](https://peritissimus.com/blog/searchable-x-bookmark-archive) (2026-10-12, 5 min read): Inside Birdbrain: capturing X bookmarks, searching saved posts, and separating local storage from hosted AI.
- [What Is Personal Software? Why I Build Tools for Myself](https://peritissimus.com/blog/what-is-personal-software) (2026-10-12, 5 min read): What personal software means, why it matters now, and five tools I built around my own routines.
- [Stone vs Obsidian vs Granola: A Local, Open-Source Alternative](https://peritissimus.com/blog/stone-vs-obsidian-vs-granola) (2026-10-05, 6 min read): 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.
- [Hybrid Search in SQLite: FTS5, Embeddings, and Rank Fusion](https://peritissimus.com/blog/markdown-notes-sqlite-search-index) (2026-09-26, 9 min read): 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.
- [whisper.cpp Meeting Transcription: Fixing Echo, Hallucinations, and Loops](https://peritissimus.com/blog/local-meeting-transcription-whisper-cpp) (2026-09-17, 10 min read): 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.
- [Stone: A Local-First Markdown Note-Taking App for Mac](https://peritissimus.com/blog/stone-local-first-note-taking-app) (2026-09-08, 7 min read): 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.
- [Processing 2,000 Hours of Media a Day with Celery and Redis](https://peritissimus.com/blog/celery-redis-media-pipeline) (2026-07-26, 11 min read): 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.
- [Scaling LLM Applications: Context, Queues, and the Cost of Personalization](https://peritissimus.com/blog/scaling-llm-applications) (2025-01-15, 9 min read): What 100K+ daily requests and AI workflows for 1,000+ businesses taught me about context selection, asynchronous execution, cost, and quality.

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