My AI side projects this year:
◆ : 2.1 million users
◆ : 400k users
◆ : 200k visitors
◆ : 29k downloads
Here's exactly how I approach building AI side projects in 6 steps:
1. Think…
My coding journey so far:
◆ March 2020: Started learning how to code in the pandemic. Spent 60-70h a week learning & building for a few months.
◆ May 2020: Changed my college major from electrical to computer engineering
◆ June 2020: Landed a remote React internship, learned…
Working on a new side project! You'll be able to upload a picture of your room and generate your dream room in different themes.
Launching later this week and as usual, it'll be 100% free and open source!
I built a
@tailwindcss
color picker chrome extension!
It calculates the closest Tailwind color in any website you open it in so you can quickly prototype.
Get it today, 100% free →
I built a
@tailwindcss
color picker chrome extension!
It will calculate the closest Tailwind color in any website you open it in so you can quickly prototype.
I built an AI news summarizer for TechCrunch articles!
1. Go to any TechCrunch article
2. Add "summary" after "techcrunch" in the URL
3. Get your summary
100% free and open source:
Learn how I approach my side projects! In 4 mins, I discuss:
◆ How I come up with side project ideas
◆ How I approach my side projects
◆ Advice for being a great builder
Shoutout to
@honeypotio
for interviewing me!
Learn how to build GPT-3 AI apps with
@OpenAI
and
@Vercel
edge functions.
In this video, I explain how I built and how you can build your own GPT-3 powered apps:
24h update after launching yesterday:
◆ 42,000 rooms generated
◆ 31,000 unique visitors
◆ 850 GitHub stars
◆ Frontpage of HN
My best performing side project so far! More details in the thread about cost & visitors.
Time management from a dying professor.
When Randy Pausch, a renowned Computer Science professor, got cancer, he decided to give one last lecture on time management before he died.
These are my top 10 takeaways from his brilliant lecture. 👇
Two months ago, I launched my side project roomGPT.
Today, it hit 3 million unique visitors and 1 million registered users!
Time to invest more in this project – I'm working on roomGPT 2.0 and it's staying 100% open source. Coming soon.
It still blows my mind how much we can do using just JavaScript 🤯
◆ Full-stack web apps (Next.js)
◆ Backends and APIs (Express)
◆ Mobile apps (React Native)
◆ ML Models (Tensorflow.js)
◆ Desktop apps (Electron)
◆ Scripting (Node.js / zx)
My year so far:
◆ 10 AI projects launched (all open source)
◆ 8 million unique visitors across all projects
◆ 20k GitHub stars & 25k
@X
followers gained
It's been a good year so far but just getting started!
My plan for the next 2 years is to master the PERN stack (Postgres, Express, React, Node).
With it, I can build:
- Full-stack web apps (any idea I have)
- Desktop apps with electron
- Mobile apps with react native
📣 Announcing , a resource for developer advocacy!
Read to learn about:
◆ How to get a job in DevRel
◆ The three types of DevRel
◆ DevRel advice and resources
I built Restore Photos in a single weekend 4 months ago and today, it hit 1 million unique visitors!
It's also still averaging 260k monthly visits with most of the traffic coming from Google.
Here's exactly how I built it:
Spoke at my biggest ever conference today!
The talk was on how to build AI projects on weekends that can scale to millions of users. Gonna post the full talk when it's out!
I'm going to build and open source an AI app every month for the rest of the year.
First one is launching September 1st! It'll be complete with auth, a database, and state of the art AI models.
More info coming soon 👀
I took the last month off from coding to focus on work and Ramadan.
Now that Ramadan is over, I'm gonna start building again. More open source AI Apps and tutorials coming soon!
Also, Eid Mubarak to all my muslim friends!
The best career advice I've ever gotten from senior engineers is:
1. Have a "breakable toy" (real app) to try and test new tech instead of just reading about it
2. Build projects and blog about things you learn
3. Have a strong bias for action and consistently improve things
Building a Twitter bio generator!
Copy your current twitter bio & it will generate a few improved variations using AI.
Launching in 2 days and as usual, it'll be free and open source.
Turned 24 today! 🎉
23 was great:
◆ Shipped 15 side projects
◆ Spoke at 6 conferences
◆ Posted 6 twitter videos
◆ Ran 3 in-person meetups
◆ Joined the talented
@vercel
team
◆ Met amazing devs in SF, NY, Miami, & Austin
Just getting started.
Turned 23 today! 🎉
22 was great:
- Sold my startup
- Started my blog
- Freelanced for other startups
- Spoke at my first podcasts/conf
- Became part of dev communities
- Met some amazing people online
Setting some big goals for this next year, I’m just getting started.
My goals for 2023:
◆ Spend 15h/week coding side projects
◆ Go to the gym 4x/week and lose 20 pounds
◆ Publish 2 videos and 1 blog post per month
◆ Develop a consistent sleep schedule
◆ Learn to cook something other than eggs
◆ Spend time with family/friends every week
Turned 25 today! 🎉
24 was great – it was the year I learned AI and got over 2 million users combined for my AI side projects.
Also got to meet some great devs, founders, & VCs in SF and NYC. Super excited for this next year, I have big plans!
I added pricing to roomGPT, making it the first side project I've ever charged for.
Also hit a cool milestone: 1.5 million unique visitors!
Here's why I added pricing and exactly how I did it:
Just migrated to use the new ChatGPT API!
Watch the difference: GPT-3 on the left and chatGPT on the right. The results are amazing:
◆ 10x cheaper ( .07 cents vs 0.7 cents)
◆ 5x faster (600ms vs 2800ms)
◆ 20 line PR change to migrate
Nextjs is pure magic.
If you're developing React apps, please do yourself a favor and use Next.
• API endpoints (No backend or cloud functions needed)
• Automatic routing (No annoying react router config)
• Performance optimizations baked in
• Static generation and/or SSR
My next AI project, QrGPT, goes live in 24 hours! It'll help you generate beautiful QR codes with custom backgrounds in seconds.
Lots of cool tech used from rate limiting by IP address to dynamic OG images to fast AI models. As usual, it'll be free and OSS!
48h update after launching :
◆ 145,000 rooms generated
◆ 90,000 unique visitors
◆ 1300 GitHub Stars
30k users in the first 24h and 60k users in the next 24h. Showing no signs of slowing down 🤯
A lot of people don’t know this about me: I build all my side projects in weekend sprints.
I’ll spend a weekend coding 24-7 to launch a project I’m passionate about then take a few weeks off from coding entirely. Then rinse and repeat.
Anyone else do this or are y’all normal?
I gained 100k users for roomGPT in the last few days since the viral roomGPT tiktok video that got 3.5M views.
Business Insider also interviewed me and wrote an article about roomGPT along with Yahoo News.
And to top it all off, I just released the new UI! Some thoughts:
Just hit 1 million unique visitors to roomGPT!
Instead of building another side project this month, I'm going to double down on roomGPT and ship some new features. New dashboard and more improvements coming soon!
My 3 goals for 2022:
1. Become a great frontend developer (TypeScript/Next.js/CSS)
2. Make content consistently (2 blogs & 2 videos per month)
3. Build better habits (earlier sleep schedule, exercise 2-3x/week, eat healthy)
The Naval Almanack by
@EricJorgenson
was one of my favorite books of 2020.
Incredible life and work advice from
@naval
distilled into 200 pages.
Here's a thread of my top 10 takeaways 👇
I can't believe that my latest side project, AICommits, is at nearly 3,000 stars and 6,000 downloads after only 2 weeks!
Version 2.0 is launching next week with many big features like conventional commits and a new UI.
We've been running the
@nextjs
job board on Github Discussions for 1.5 years now!
150+ companies like Walmart and Sony have posted jobs and several hundred developers have posted their profiles.
I love getting emails like this from devs who landed jobs through it 🖤
We've been running a
@nextjs
job board on Github Discussions for 1 full year!
100+ companies like Walmart and Sony have posted jobs and hundreds of developers have posted their profiles.
Super proud of all the devs we helped get jobs for in 2022! Here's to more jobs in 2023!
Incredibly excited to announce I've joined
@vercel
as a Developer Advocate! 🎉
I've been so impressed with Vercel as a company and their focus on great developer experience.
Can't wait to contribute and help grow the Next.js and Vercel communities!
I crossed 2 years at
@vercel
today! 🎉
Super thankful for
@leeerob
and
@manovotny
, the best managers I've ever had.
They're kind, supportive, and give me so much trust and flexibility to do cool things at work. I appreciate you guys 🖤
@youyuxi
Could use OpenAI embeddings for this (which are very cheap) and still combine it with GPT-4.
1. Run all of Vue’s docs through the OpenAI embeddings API
2. Store results in a vector db like pinecone
3. Whenever the user asks the bot a question, convert their question to an…
It's been a crazy 48 hours for .
◆ Featured on several news sites and newsletters
◆ 22,000 unique users and 60,000 page views
◆ 28,000 image restorations processed
◆ Traffic is still strong at 7,000 visitors a day
Only getting started!
It's been exactly a week since I launched and it just hit 500,000 unique visitors!
My 2023 goal was to launch a side project that got 10,000 visitors. Safe to say, mission accomplished.
I had a lot of help along the way, particularly from:
◆ My dad, who also started learning how to code in the pandemic so we'd go through the journey together
◆ My mom, who is incredibly encouraging and always there for me with encouragement (and food 😂)
◆ People who've pair…
The job market for developer advocates has never been hotter.
I have 10+ startups in my DMs that are looking for devrels, $100-180k base, US remote.
If you're a software engineer with experience in content creation / community building, happy to connect you. DMs are open!
You can now clone and deploy roomGPT in 1 click!
After getting 50+ DMs about roomGPT being too hard to run locally, I just simplified it by removing auth, payments, and the database.
I built an image to text API!
It takes in an image and outputs a one sentence description of it using machine learning.
Very useful for tasks like generating meaningful alt tags for images. Try it out today – it's open source!
In the last 8 hours, my photo restorer app got 13,000 visits and 5000 unique users 🤯
There were also 6,000 image generations (which cost me $20). Thank you all for the support!
One of the most rewarding parts of the pandemic was teaching my dad to code which he loved.
He's pretty decent in Python now & learning JavaScript. Gonna be giving him React/Next.js lessons soon!
My 2021 highlights:
◆ 10 side projects (one got a patent)
◆ 90 commits to open source repos
◆ Spoke at my first 4 conferences
◆ Met amazing people in SF & NY
◆ Freelanced for 2 startups
◆ Graduated from college
◆ Landed a dream job
Just got early access to Google's PaLM API, the new API for interacting with Google's large language models.
Been building a video title generator to try it out with
@Vercel
Edge Functions – seems promising so far!
My twitterbio side project went viral today out of nowhere – usually averages 500 visitors a day but got 53,000 visitors today.
All the traffic seems to be coming from folks tweeting about it as well. Also got hit with a $120 OpenAI bill right away and hit my account limit.