The Weekend AI Engineer: Hassan El Mghari

Key Takeaways

[Music] in this talk I'm going to walk you through uh some of my projects that I've built and all of the lessons that I learned along the way to build great AI apps that can scale to millions of users so let's get right into it so to to set the stage with some context I've been building projects uh pretty consistently for about 2 years now uh and so last year I built about 11 side projects and they got about 20,000 visitors total uh so not too shabby uh so my goal for this year was to try to double that number and get to 40,000 visitors and uh happy to announce that I did hit that goal and slightly exceeded it as well um and uh thank you um and uh basically here today to talk about how this happened and you know very thankful and and very lucky that that I managed to to hit such a good number over 8 million unique visitors across all of my projects 20,000 GitHub stars and about 2.8 million people uh that signed up and fun fact every single one of these projects that I launched was built on the weekend so um I'm going to pick through some of these projects and we're going to go through them and and talk about some some lessons learned I also want to mention that everything I do is open source so you can check out all of my projects at github.com nutlope embarrassing gamer username from like 10 years ago that I can't get rid of um but yeah no I love building an open source and and it makes me so happy to see people uh use my projects uh but it's also a very good growth lever when you launch um and I get a lot of genuinely helpful PRS from from a lot of people uh that are uh better at prompt engineering than I am so it's always helpful uh disclaimer I I do have a bit of an audience on Twitter uh which is very helpful but honestly I don't think it's as important as people make it out to be a lot of people um a lot of people can kind of attribute having a lot of followers to having successful projects but I I've seen plenty of people have very successful side projects with little to no Twitter following and in fact less than 5% of the traffic of those 8.5 million people that have visited all of my projects less than 5% of that traffic actually comes from my Twitter account so you may be thinking where does this traffic come from and uh honestly it's a lot of word of mouth and Google and SEO and uh other influencers sharing it so I'm going to get to that uh in a bit as well um so today I want to talk to you all uh like friends and when I talk to my friends about my projects I kind of just share um my laptop and go through a bunch of things so I'm going to I'm going to switch over to uh my laptop here and and go through a bunch of uh my side projects so let's do that wonderful so this is kind of the my my first AI project how I got into AI last December and really it stemmed from uh this this problem that we had where we had just run a conference last year and we had several hundred photos uh out there in an image gallery and and right before we published it my CEO uh came up to me and was like hey we probably need to add Al tags for a lot of these images and uh that would have been a very painful process going through several hundred images so I I looked stuff up and I found a nice image to text API that ended up working really well you know I went and I and I checked a lot of these um a lot of the old tags and maybe fixed like two of them and published but this is is really my big like light bulb moment of like oh my God AI can really really help you save a ton of time like this isn't some web 3 hype from last year you know this is real um no I'm kidding web 3 has its place for sure but this is really the the the big thing when when it came out so uh I built this little open source project I put it out there and then I just started having fun and building other stuff so I built another project called QR gbt with my friend Kevin at a hackathon uh and so the idea is that you just generate um just pretty nice Q QR code so we can actually go and and uh generate a QR code for AI um ai. engineer I forgot the domain name uh and we can select a prompt here I'm going to just click one of the pregenerated ones a forest overlooking a mountain and hopefully in like five or six seconds it should generate a QR code that links to the conference that just looks a little bit better than the black and white QR codes um and so we built this and we we weren't expecting way too much um because people really don't have to generate QR codes every single minute um so yeah we put it out there got about 8,000 visitors about 8,000 QR codes generated and so we were like okay cool um and I was like all right I want to try to build something that has more like daily active users or people that will use it consistently so I built this little uh tool that summarizes um TechCrunch articles so the idea is that you go to techcrunch.com you can click any article that you want and all you have to do is add summary to the end of the URL over there and it'll redirect you to my website and kind of summarize the whole article using GPT t uh 3.5 in a couple bullet points um and so the reason I'm showing you a video here and not a live demo is cuz I got a very nice email from the tech crunch lawyers uh when I launched this telling me to take it down so that was that was a lot of fun uh but yeah anyway I I took it down and I moved on that one did it did pretty good when I launched it and then they made me take it down and and uh it kind of kind of died off from there and then I started just like replying to random people on on Twitter so Samina here asked like can someone help me build an AI to help me pay classes so I was like all right bet I got you and uh built this little thing in like a couple hours where it Tak some information about yourself your face shape and your your gender and you can add some relevant context and it uses a combination of llms and the Amazon API to find the ideal glasses for you and actually links them on there so that you can buy them uh so yeah I just started replying to a bunch of tweets another one was by my friend Theo who said someone should make an app that kind of autog generates commit messages for you and uh and then my CTO tagged me and was like CC uh San I love that idea which translates to build this as soon as possible um so I was like all right I got you and uh I I built a little uh built a little tool so essentially you could run G ad you run the CLI tool that I built AI commit and it analyzes your G diff and produces a little commit message for you that you can then uh use to commit um and these are like very small hacky Solutions you know my CTO tagged me at 7:53 p.m. on February 11th and then less than 2 hours later I replied with that little W with that little script thank you and after I saw it get some attention I was like okay I need to clean this up I need to figure out how to bundle it into an mpm package uh and so uh that's what I spent my Monday morning on I hope my manager isn't watching but uh that that was that was a fun Monday and yeah kind of bundled it out there and posted it as uh an mpm package and now I think over uh 30 ,000 uh developers uh are are now using it to to commit their messages and it's one of my more popular open source repos I there's some PRS that I need to take a look at but um yeah a bunch of 6,000 stars and about 25 uh contributors and so this was kind of my Exploration with with llms and and so actually I I have one more project called the Twitter biogenerator and essentially uh also open source like most of my other projects but um you just put in some context uh about you so we can do like engineer at Microsoft and we can say loves volleyball and uh pick a Vibe and it'll make your Twitter bio for you and kind of stream in text from uh GPT 3.5 um spiking code bugs and volleyball balls you you can't get any better than that um but you might you might take a look at some of these projects and think like this is so simple like nobody's going to use this this is just like this little chat gbt rapper like everybody in this room can build this thing um but but but I think we we constantly underestimate like that the majority of the world are not AI Engineers nobody can build this a lot of people haven't even used Shad gbt yet like it's crazy so even the simplest apps can do really really well and so that's a common theme that you might see is like all of these are very uh very simple apps so I launched it and and it got about 200,000 visitors uh that that used it I got about 100,000 people in a single weekend and then um I hit my uh open AI Bill and had to shut it down for a little bit so it's always a good sign um and so after this I kind of switched into image to image model so I built this um photo restore website that basically unblurs old photos and the motivation behind this actually was my parents sending me these old photos so I'm actually going to put in a picture of my dad doing karate when he was like 18 and he sent me this photo and his face is really blurry um and uh you'll see yeah he's flexible I do not I did not inherit that um but you see his face is a little bit blurry you can't see it too well but hopefully in the space of a a few seconds we should see um and so this is used just a gan model it's called gfp Gan uh it sends it to that model and it will basically um scan like all the faces in in a picture and restore it so we'll see uh if the internet is working out um we'll hopefully see the image come in in a few seconds and if not I can move on and and come back to it all right I'll come back to it um so again open source repo um and this one like really really did well um and it kind of is my most consistent project it still has about 250,000 people that that use it uh every month um mostly actually in India and Indonesia which makes a lot of sense because the the phone cameras there are a lot lower quality um so it makes sense that they would use it but shortly after went viral I got a lot of uh inappropriate images being uploaded and so I had to uh I used actually tensorflow.js uh and I published this as a library as well um but yeah I just ended up using this to to scan the image and make sure it was safe before I process processed it so let's go back okay so it looks like it it was restored I'll actually put them side by side and zoom in a little bit so you can see his face before a little bit blurry and then after the transformation you can see it it really really clears up thank and um really another thing I want to stress here is that this is one single API call to this gfp Gan model and that's it and and he's really getting that and displaying it back to the user um so there's it's it's such an exciting time to be an AI engineer and to build this stuff it's so easy and it's so impressive to other people as well uh so my my La I'm going to talk about one more project and then I'm going to start to talk about some takeaways uh but before that actually this is like the architecture for for most of my apps uh really I I use an xjs on the front end and the back end and you saw for restore photos there's this little upload component that I use and so that it the user uploads an image it gets sent to cloud storage and then I send that image URL to my nextjs API route or you can think of it as just like a Lambda function um and then that sends it to my machine learning model to gfp Gan to get restored it gets back the image sends it back to the client and display it to the user so this is kind of the architecture I use for a lot of my image to image um side projects uh by my last one which um I'll I'll restart but my my last one uh that did the best is actually called room GPT and it's that idea of um if you give it a room I'm just going to give it a random living room from the internet and we're going to select a couple themes but if you give it a a room and some themes the idea is that it'll use this and it'll help you redesign your room it'll it'll give you different variations of that specific room different color themes different like couch Styles and stuff like that so we can see it just finished you can see uh it it really respects the structure of the room so it looks the same but it gives you you know different ideas for these like tables and backgrounds and tiles and and everything like that um so really the the motivation behind this project was that I I saw somebody else built this before but they use stable diffusion and stable diffusion actually does a notoriously bad job at maintaining the original structure of a room like you can give it a room you can tell it okay redesign this in this theme and the image it produces looks nothing like the original room like the dimensions are messed up the depth is mess is messed up and then I saw this new model called control net that came out uh and control net does really well at maintaining that structure of the room so I saw that and I was like oh this this could be cool to build um so I I put it out there and I launched it on uh on Twitter and obviously it's also it's also open source but I I launched it on Twitter and uh it it did pretty well on there and and kind of um kept tweeting about it because the thing about Twitter when you tweet about something 24 hours later it's kind of dead uh so what I like to do is I like to kind of post updates over and over again so uh we had about 10,000 people that used it in the first 12 hours and then um 30,000 in in the first day and then I added some testimonials um may or may not have paid these people and then yeah two days later it had like 90,000 people and then three days 270,000 people and so it kind of just it kind of just blew up and I feel like it was just it was mostly because I was one of the first people to kind of productionize this this control net model that had just that had just come out so a lot of people were seeing it uh for for the first time and using it and uh most of these users again I can show you the the analytics chart so I have about 6 million people that have visited the site and about a little over two million that that have registered and and used it and you can see the vast majority of the traffic is is just Google it's just uh straight up from Google you know it a lot of people kept sharing it and you know part of that I think is because it was open source and a lot of developers liked it and re-shared it uh but also uh the fact that I kept it free so I'm I'm going to talk about how I did that kind of uh when I transitioned back to uh slides so those are some of my side projects um one thing I want to call out is um it's a really good idea to use AI enhancing tools when building a lot of this stuff so use gb4 for your code we have an AIS SDK that you can use uh over at vers and we also have this product called v0 at verell and so it helps you kind of generate uis uh and what's really cool is you can kind of see other people generating UI we can click on uh this one for example which looks like the Apple notes UI um and we can actually for we we can look at the code which is cool so we can I can copy all this code but what's also cool is I can look at these templates or look at other people's code and I can Fork it similar to how I can Fork a GitHub repo so now this is mine I can kind of add additional prompts to change it or I can click this button over here and actually select different elements within the page so I can select this div and tell it like uh add uh three more notes and Alternate their colors I can press enter and update and what it'll do is it'll just render this specific div and it'll stream in the data using our versel AISD it'll stream in these react components um and uh yeah hopefully it'll it'll it'll keep going and and add all this stuff in and again as it streams in these components it adds them inside of this uh code box over here um so we'll I think it's still generating but eventually you know it'll it'll add all all of the notes here and we can go into the the code and kind of copy and paste it uh we can also run a c command you can see it Scrolls down because it's still generating here's yeah note three note four note five there you go so added the five notes I can go take all this code or run this command and uh get all the code and kind of iterate on uis that way so it's just a way to kind of prototype a very early uh uis so I'm going to go back to slides right now to talk about some uh takeaways so use AI tools to move faster I I mentioned that I mentioned the AISD I mentioned vzer but there's a lot of really amazing libraries I I love using uh replicate and hugging face and modal and and a lot of these other tools and brev uh there's a lot of really cool stuff you can use uh to to kind of train your models or or move faster uh when you're coding so this is a bit of a spicy one um I always tell people don't don't do any fine-tuning and don't build your own models and this is specifically for launching MVPs cuz again the purpose of this talk and everything is like building projects very quickly on weekends so you don't have time to fine-tune you want to keep things very very simple if you can't describe your idea to me in five words like it might not do great you know I have friends that come up to me that are like oh I want to build this platform for developers where they can connect them to clients and they can have their portfolios there and they can have a chat and they can have this and I just like s into them and I'm like that's that's not going to happen like that's not you can't build that in a weekend you know if you can't build a so what I tell them is just basically down scope to an MVP and then launch it and even room gbt when I launched that I had so many machine learning Engineers that dm' me on Twitter and we're like oh my God like what models did you train what parameters did you use how did you get the data how did you clean your data I'm like dude I just use like an API off the shelf you know U you don't you don't need you can do so much with off the-shelf apis another one is use the latest models I mentioned a big part of room GPT success is is using um control net which had just come out a couple days before uh launching early and iterating is so so important uh because you don't know it's going to do well so if you can drisk your projects if you can get a project out in one or two weekends and if it fails so what you can pivot you can move on to a new idea and and you can just just yeah you can just move on other things um and so and if it does well then you can double down on it then you can add uh additional things to it so I I've found that to be to be great another one is making it free and open source making things open source is is always great because uh people learn from it and are incentivized to share it and we'll open PRS to your project um and we'll also get you a bunch of followers you know I gained like 25,000 Twitter followers this year just from posting a bunch of these open source projects and they're just all developers uh wanting to learn and and and help me out so open source is amazing uh making things free is a little bit hard right because as we know AI workloads are really really expensive and so there's a few ways you can do this I kind of play to my strengths you know I have a Twitter audience so I can go to companies and be like hey I want to launch this project I think it'll get x amount of users um please give me some credits and I'll shout you out in the footer and I'll put you in the read me and all this stuff but I've seen a lot of other people replicate this with no followers and the key is to just build a very highquality open source project put it out there put like a $50 limit on it and when you run out you can reach out to the company and say hey like my project went viral on Twitter and it's featuring you and the the GitHub uh repo's open source so when companies see this they're they're kind of willing to um give you some uh credit so shout out to replicate and bite scale and neon and and a bunch of my other uh sponsors that help me keep a lot of my AI projects free and the last lesson that I have for you is making sure your UI looks good nobody's going to use your product if it doesn't look good uh that's just something that's been learned and so I actually spend like 80% of my time on the UI even though these are like AI projects most of the time is on the UI cuz you need to make it look good uh so um and if you're not a designer you can just take inspiration from a bunch of different websites um and that's what I do I'm not a designer so I just look at like five other websites and I kind of uh steal a little bit of each site to make it look good because uh I don't know how to just come and make a website that makes that that looks good but I know when something looks good when I see it so uh that that's kind of what I do so very quick uh summary um if you do these five things I I think you can go very very far and lastly like I I tell people to use whatever text stack uh they want to use I like the Tex stack of like nextjs and typescript and Tailwind lets me move really quickly and then using uh versel for deploying my apps two final ideas and then I'm going to get off the stage so better speakers can come and and tell you about their project but um I don't work 24/7 despite what you might think with with with all of that I actually spend most of my weekends relaxing uh but what I do is I work in Sprints so I'll take a single weekend and I'll just drop everything and go and try to put out a project and and and then for the next like two or three weekends I'll just binge Netflix shows and hang out with friends and live my life um so this has worked out for me but when I say like I work all weekend I mean like 12 hour Saturday 12 hour Sunday kind of deal you know I kind of drop everything and do that and so if you have flexibility in your life to do that you can go ahead and try it if you're married or have kids or have other responsibilities you can experiment with what works for you you know you can spend a couple hours every weekend here and there um but but that's what I do basically a weekend a month where I sit down and I put out a project and then relax um for a little bit um so yeah moral of the story is I think like do what works for you I'm just kind of sharing what what's worked for me and the final thought I want to put out there is that you need to like put in the hours I think PE a lot of people DM me and are like hey like I'm feeling really unmotivated because I'm trying to build these projects and they're taking me so much time and like uh you know how do you do it like what's your secret and um the first thing I ask him is like oh like I'm sorry to hear that how many projects have you built and more often than not they're like oh this is my second project and I just stare at them and I'm like you can't go to the gym for the second time ever and then look down and be like where are my biceps like where where it doesn't work like that you know you have to go to the gym consistently over months to see progress and so the same thing happens with with side projects and coding in general and if you're an engineer that's even better I I am not an engineer actually I I don't do I don't write code for most of my time at work and I just learned a codee a few years ago so I think genuinely anybody can do it um you just have to to kind of uh put out the put in the hours and and build and good things will happen so thank you so much for having [Applause] [Music] me