How I ended up building storylearner.app

I’ve always been drawn to self-directed learning. My interests have been pretty diverse - I would spend countless hours on math, science, soft-skills, movement skills (juggling, handstands) as well as languages.

A long standing language learning obsession

Over the years (starting as a teenager), I’ve seriously studied eight languages — not because I had to, but because I found it fun, challenging, and fascinating. Through trial and error, I’ve learned a lot about what actually works for adult learners learning on their own. And I also learned about all possible pitfalls, the main of them being, abandoning the project and losing all the progress due to forgetting.

3 Reflections from a sabbatical after Google

I quit Google at the end of July 2024 and I took a work break until mid-January 2025 (when I joined a startup accelerator full time). It would be a miss if I didn’t reflect on my sabbatical experience!

I will describe what I was up to in another post, but in short it was a mix of traveling and hanging out at my home base in Dublin. Here my 3 main reflections!

How to transcribe long audios fast with open source (colab included)

In this post I will give you code that you can run yourself in Colab (or on your own machine with a GPU), that will allow you to very quickly transcribe long audios in many languages.

The setup uses the whisper model from huggingface, Google Drive and Colab.

I used it to transcribe multi hour podcasts within a couple of minutes (about 1-5 minutes depending on the length).

Motivation

Some time ago I was getting frustrated that the podcasts that I was listening to didn’t have transcriptions available.

I killed my side projects - clean slate

I have recently shut down the indie products I’ve been accumulating over the years, RIP:

• redeal.app - real estate investment calculator - inspired by bigger pockets, initially scraping daft (irish real estate listing website)
• invertimo.com - investment tracking and bookkeeping (open source), useful for stocks, funds or any sort of crypto assets if multiple exchanges/etc are used, was integrated with degiro, interactive brokers and binance… + manual uploads
• watchlimits.com (that is partially alive as the last version is still available in the chrome store, but the ‘premium features’ won’t be working) - a productivity extension helping with excessive video watching online

I lost motivation to work on these projects, they were either in zombie stage (Redeal/Invertimo) or in somewhat alive stage (watchlimits), but little momentum or financial potential. I would occasionally get some support/feature requests for watchlimits, but I didn’t want to throw good money after bad (in terms of my productive project time).

Learning Deep Generative Modelling from Stanford

I am a big fan of self-directed learning, but I have never before spent almost 2 thousands of dollars on a single course. Was it worth it? Who could most benefit from that?

I took the Deep Generative Modeling course from Standford online for 1750 dollars.

It was a first such course for me and before committing to it, I had some questions and doubts as it was rather expensive. I hope sharing my experience will help out people in a similar situation.

Postmortem of my 9 year journey at Google

I started writing this retrospective during my last week at Google, I have already wrapped up everything, had my goodbyes. In the spirit of SRE (as an ex-SRE), I thought it would be fun to write a little retrospective in the form of a postmortem.

Introduction

I joined Google young and relatively inexperienced and had spent about 9 years there.

I started my journey in software at 19 (first internship) and then continued working part and full time while continuing my degree in Applied Physics. I got disillusioned with working in physics during the course of my degree, software turned out to be a more promising career path.

I quit my startup because of comic sans

Okay, it wasn’t really caused by the Comic Sans.

I had very fun 3 months of pretty fun collaboration and intense learning, but in the end I had this very clear feeling that I would be better of on my own.

It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t great. There were many small and big things that were making our fit non-ideal, and I had doubts growing in me, and one Sunday night, a pick deck in Comic Sans topped me over the edge to call it quits.

Two worlds: idea people and developers

I recently attended a startup weekend and was surprised by the backgrounds of the other attendees.

As a software engineer myself, I expected to see mostly engineers, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, I found myself surrounded by people with a diverse range of backgrounds and experiences, all of whom shared one thing in common: they had an idea.

At the same time, couple months ago started running an Indie Hackers Meetup in Dublin, a software startup meetup that mostly attracts developers.

Fun indie projects

I wrote in November that I’m taking a break from indie hacking, well, the break didn’t take long (2-3 months).

A break made sense at that time, because my project watchlimits.com wasn’t getting traction and I just changed jobs. New job presented a lot of new learning opportunities and as any change was somewhat stressful, so I didn’t want to overload myself and risk a burnout.

I am back in a not fully “serious” capacity. I am not doing any serious business right now. I have a bunch of promising ideas, but for now I’m exploring some pretty dumb ones.