victords

> The fastest moving and most effective organizations I've worked at are ones that focused on code quality from the beginning.

I agree with that in the pre-LLM world, but I don’t believe it’s the same today.

You can build something with “bad” code that works and is full of technical debt, but today paying this debt is getting cheaper and cheaper.

So if Claude’s wrong design decision leads to having to refactor several chunks of a codebase in order to implement a new feature, does it really matter if it’s Claude who is going to refactor it in a matter of seconds? Especially for a company like Anthropic which has a virtually unlimited number of tokens to spend on it.

I started coding around 2013, picked up a book, learned Java and started building Android apps. It was fun at the time, and pretty painless to get your app in the store.

Fast forward to last year, with all the rage about coding tools, I got into building small projects again, and built a simple app. After a decade from posting my last app on Google Play I resurrected my account, and started going through the process of publishing an app today... And how awful things got!

Back then it was essentially, title, description, upload your Apk and some screenshots and you're done! Now there are reviews, privacy policy, endless amount of forms and information you need to fill out. I get why (some) things are the way they are today, but when you just want to make an app for fun, getting it out there just feels like work. I gave up on the app, made it into a website, and in the end it actually felt better (and so much easier).

Not OP, but I’m running local models on a M1 Max as well with 64GB RAM.

It varies by model, but I’m getting 50-60 t/s with Qwen 3.6 35B and Qwen 3 coder 30B.

I’ve also used Qwen 3.8 27B but I get 10t/s on it.

It’s useable in some use cases, but I rely mostly on my $20 Claude subscription.

As mentioned before, I think Apple hardware is the best alternative right now.

Mac Studio, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro, you can find even some used ones with enough RAM that will run models like Qwen reasonably well.

I'm using a M1 Max MacBook Pro and it runs Qwen 3.5 on Ollama (without MLX) at a decent speed.

A fun project doesn't need to be original, IMO.

URL Shortener is still one of the most popular System Design questions, building this project is a great way to have some experience / understanding of it, for example.

Loved the idea!

VictorSantiago.me

Only actual update I do is to change my title / company when I change jobs, otherwise it's just a landing page to link to my GH, LinkedIn, etc. No blogs or anything exciting.

Are you able to sponsor visa? Already based in London, but would need visa to switch jobs.

The way you put it, looks like IBM is a pretty good place to work at

The homebrew scene still exists today, just moved consoles.

I was just playing around with the Xbox Dev Mode this weekend and trying out different emulators.

> The fact this tech is becoming g democratized is good.

The issue is that it's only democratized if you have the money.

I'd imagine not everything can be paid on a credit card. E.g.: Rent.