DEV Community: joepaulvilsan

How can I use AI while coding , instead of just vibe coding like prompting and building without understanding How can I leverage AI while building something such that I will not be irreplaceable at later point of time ? #Doubt #Askmeanything

joepaulvilsan — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 06:51:31 +0000

Building a Chat App: From Monolith Mindset to Microservices & Consistency

joepaulvilsan — Sat, 25 Oct 2025 04:24:52 +0000

Hey everyone! 👋

I wanted to share an update on my journey building a real-time chat application from scratch. It's a 15-week personal project, and I'm currently about a third of the way through, just wrapping up Week 4.

Weeks 1-3 Recap: Building the Foundation

The first phase was all about the backend basics. I built the initial Authentication and User services using FastAPI and connected them to a PostgreSQL database via SQLModel. A big step was getting comfortable dockerizing these services and using Docker Compose to manage them (along with the database) locally. I also implemented JWT for authentication.

Week 4 & Beyond: Entering Kubernetes & Core Chat

This past week, I've started diving into Kubernetes – learning about Pods, Deployments, and Services with the goal of deploying these initial services to a local cluster. It's definitely a step up in complexity!

Next up: building the core real-time chat backend, likely involving WebSockets and maybe a message queue.

The Struggle for Consistency (and a Tip from Atomic Habits)

Let's be real – staying motivated and consistent on a long solo project is tough. Procrastination definitely creeps in, and sticking perfectly to the plan doesn't always happen.

One thing that's helped is remembering a key idea from James Clear's Atomic Habits: showing up, even in a small way, is infinitely better than doing nothing. Getting just 0.1% done is better than 0%. So even on days when I lack motivation, I try to do something – read a bit of documentation, refactor one small function, write down notes. It keeps the ball rolling, prevents inertia, and reminds me that every little bit compounds.

Anyone Interested in Pair Programming?

Coding alone can sometimes feel like shouting into the void! I've been thinking that having an accountability partner or doing some pair programming sessions could be really beneficial. It's a great way to learn faster, bounce ideas off someone, stay motivated, and just make the process more fun.

Is anyone else working on similar tech (FastAPI, React, Docker, maybe diving into K8s soon) or just looking for someone to code with occasionally? Drop a comment or message me – let's connect!

Excited to keep building and learning. Onwards! 💪

BuildInPublic #DeveloperJourney #Microservices #FastAPI #React #Docker #Kubernetes #AtomicHabits #PairProgramming #WebDev

How to build SER model?

joepaulvilsan — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 04:59:54 +0000

I want to build a speech emotion recognition model that correctly predicts the emotion by speech. Is there any pretrained models like speechbrain,Wav2Vec2. If any provide the correct model name like name of Wav2Vec2 model or is it better to build the model from scratch like building a CNN model from scratch or finetuning ASR pretrained model is better.Give me suggestions I need minimum 80% accuracy

Starting From Scratch

joepaulvilsan — Thu, 10 Apr 2025 03:12:35 +0000

planning to study full stack development from scratch, instead of just watching tutorials thinking about studying from base javascript to advanced topics like devops,cloud etc.Although there are many ai tools for full stack development I think understanding to build a software is a stepping stone in becoming a core developer and also a person with good knowledge is required to manage all tools.

Do anyone have any suggestions,roadmap,advice or any other specific topic I need to include