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Why I Pivoted StoryLearner Instead of Giving Up
I have a secret for you: the first version of storylearner.app looked pretty different!
It had a pretty compelling story generation feature, where you could influence the story, pick the characters, and so on…
It looked good ā the illustrations were very compelling, and the stories were pretty fun. But I ripped it away. In this post, Iāll dive into how I realized I needed to make the change, what to change, and how I executed it.
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How I ended up building storylearner.app
Iāve 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), Iāve seriously studied eight languages ā not because I had to, but because I found it fun, challenging, and fascinating. Through trial and error, Iāve 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.
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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 didnāt 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!
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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.
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I killed my side projects - clean slate
I have recently shut down the indie products Iāve 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 āpremium featuresā wonāt 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 didnāt want to throw good money after bad (in terms of my productive project time).
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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.
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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.
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I quit my startup because of comic sans
Okay, it wasnāt 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 wasnāt awful, but it wasnāt 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.
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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.
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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.
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