I ran Qwen3.5-9B, a 4-bit quantized model, locally on my MacBook Pro M4 Pro with 24 GB of RAM, pointed a terminal coding agent at it, and asked it to build a checkout page with the Stripe API. It did. No cloud, no API calls to OpenAI, no token costs. Just a model running on my laptop. Here’s how. Qwen 3.5 Qwen3.5 is Alibaba’s latest open-weight language model family. The 9B variant sits in a sweet spot: large enough to be genuinely useful for coding tasks, small enough to run on consumer hardware once quantized. It supports a 256K token context window and performs competitively with much larger models on coding benchmarks. [read more]

What if you could search for salaries not by exact keywords, but by describing a job in natural language? “Senior developer in Brussels with a company car” or “nurse working in Antwerp” — and get relevant results based on semantic similarity rather than string matching. This is exactly what I built with BeSalary: an AI-powered salary search engine that extracts structured data from Reddit posts using local LLMs and enables semantic search through vector embeddings. You can try it live at besalary-wine.vercel.app. [read more]

On http://www.brussel.be/webcam-grote-markt you can find a webcam stream of the Grand Place in Brussels. When I saw this I was wondering if I could build a model to trace individual people and eventually track their behaviour while walking on one of the most touristy spots in Brussels. I set up a website with TensorFlow.js using the coco-ssd model but was slightly dissapointed with the results. After doing some more research I read about transfer learning and decided to try and improve model. [read more]

During last summer I was looking for inspiration to do a long term mountain biking trip that would be challenging but pretty risk free at the same time. I had a time frame of three weeks in November so I started to look into possibilities when quickly my eye fell on a flight to Kathmandu. Nepal ticked off all the boxes I was looking for in my next trip, so without too much overthinking slightly nervous I booked the flights. [read more]

I got the question from a client who was making frames for medal with a cnc machine if we could determine the dimensions of a medal from a simple picture. Today the client has to request the physical medals being mailed to him in order to be able to create the digital model that can be consumed by his CNC machine. iOS 12 comes these days with the Measure app that uses augmented reality to provide dimension information on objects that are being scanned with the camera. [read more]