DEV Community: janBuild

Beautiful QR Codes with AI

janBuild — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 08:15:25 +0000

Hey devs,

I was experimenting with artistic QR codes, and I was able to generate really beautiful results sometimes. So I turned it into a tool for everybody. The art is still ai-powered, but maybe I will add a way to upload original design assets and merge the code around them (would you find that interesting?).

Sometimes it takes a couple of generations to make a code that works, but in my opinion, it’s something we can do today that we didn’t have yesterday (apart from diffusion ones). So let’s go :)

P.S.: I've just launched this on ProductHunt today:
https://www.producthunt.com/products/scanwayy

New Version of ListenDock (with Videos)

janBuild — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 08:41:38 +0000

Hey! I've made another round of updates to my site https://listendock.com/

I added a multi-speaker podcast style narration like in NotebookLM and a free text-to-speech option.

If you have ideas for new formats let me know (eg. instead of multi-speaker podcast style).

What do you wish existed?

Bringing art to qr-codes

janBuild — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:24:47 +0000

Hey, in case anyone of you needs to generate qr-codes and you are not happy with the boring design, I made a little tool to make the codes much nicer. After all I find them really useful.

Maybe its just in my country, but I see them everywhere now.

https://scanwayy.com/

I turned Ilya Sutskever’s 30-paper reading list into chapter-by-chapter audio overviews

janBuild — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 09:11:54 +0000

Hey, the story behind this list is that John Carmack asked Ilya Sutskever for a reading list to get up to date with todays AI technology. Ilya gave him a list and said if he reads and understands those papers, he will understand 90% of what matters in modern deep learning.

I turned 22 of the papers into AI-narrated audio episodes. You can listen to the key insights of each paper, chapter by chapters (the others were books, courses or too long).

I found it a good starting point to get an initial overview. I still recommend to read the actual papers and articles though. From a learning perspective, I think its easier to parse the details of a paper when you already have a good idea of the content. At least this was my experience with lectures, when I read the slides before the lecture, it was easier to follow what the professor said.

Here is the list: https://listendock.com/30-papers

Connecting a Node.js App to MongoDB - while listening to techno, because thats more fun 🎶

janBuild — Wed, 03 Apr 2024 05:49:24 +0000

Hey friends, in this video, I show you how to connect a Node.js app to MongoDB.

https://youtu.be/pg2Ma4iFYM8

The goal is to enable a signed-in user to store entries in the database, ensuring that these entries are only accessible by that specific user.

Let me know if you find that useful :)

Create instant aliases

janBuild — Thu, 14 Mar 2024 21:55:43 +0000

Here is Ali, my first open source tool: https://github.com/janpmz/ali

Press the up arrow and just add the following infront of the last command:
ali aliname

And use alianalyze to find frequent commands in your history, then turn them to aliases!

I would love your feedback!

I didn't want to read a deep learning book, so I built a tool to read it for me

janBuild — Wed, 28 Feb 2024 10:07:16 +0000

I discovered the free ebook Understanding Deep Learning and I had the idea to listen to the book, instead of reading it on the screen.

So I've built a tool to turn it into MP3s so I can listen to it. I'm now almost done with the book, I listen to the audio chapters every day on my commute to work.

For regular text you can simply use any text-to-speech api, but for technical text containing formulas its more contrived. So I used ChatGPT to simplify the text for a better audio experience.

I've just launched the MVP, so let me know what you think. Do you like the simplification of the text? pdftomp3.com