DEV Community: Tim

From Burnout to Building: One Indie Dev's Story Behind Mozart

Tim — Mon, 18 May 2026 19:52:22 +0000

"I'm sick of working for other people's dreams."

That's the sentence that started it all. Not a rational decision, not a business plan, not a flash of genius, just exhaustion turning into clarity. One evening, in Montpellier, after weeks of chasing freelance gigs and hitting walls.

A few days later, I started building Mozart. This blog tells what comes next.

But first, let me rewind a bit.

I'm a self-taught developer. I discovered code at 14, and I learned everything on my own, through documentation, failed projects, and YouTube tutorials until 5 in the morning. For the last two years, I've done a few freelance gigs for small companies while travelling: Vietnam, Turkey, Portugal, Morocco, Thailand. Between stopovers, I tried to launch my own apps. None of them took off. I ended up dropping code for a while, I have this annoying tendency to overdose on what I love. But the passion always comes back.

When I picked code back up after a few months without a computer, it hit me hard. LLMs had made a massive leap.

I realised that the way we code was changing at a deep level. The craft of code is mutating: developers aren't just the ones writing each line anymore, they're becoming the ones who orchestrate, direct, and arbitrate.

A code manager.

Arthur Mensch, co-founder of Mistral, made the point recently in front of the French National Assembly: the bottleneck is no longer code production. It has shifted toward design and coordination. The more agents you stack, the more productivity you gain, but that productivity plateaus quickly if you don't know how to pilot them.

That's exactly the problem I want to solve.

The dormant dream

Around 2014, I discovered Y Combinator. At the time, I wasn't a developer yet. I had a civil engineering technician degree and worked in a lab, mostly on the road inspecting sports facilities. In the car, I listened to podcasts by Oussama Ammar (co-founder of The Family). A controversial figure, you love him or you don't, but he infused YC culture into France and inspired my generation. In parallel, I was reading Paul Graham's essays. All of that shaped how I saw startups, but only as a spectator. Watching from the sidelines, not daring to get my hands dirty.

Later, when I got seriously into code, the urge to start my own company never left me. But I always had an excellent excuse to put it off: "I'm self-taught", "I lack experience", "I still need to earn my stripes", "It's not the right time".

In hindsight, I know what was happening. There's never a right time. The real blocker wasn't my level. It was that I hadn't yet found the idea. The one that makes you say: this is it, this is now, I'm not letting it pass.

Crossing the desert

Finding your path is a chaotic process. At least it was for me. I regularly cross deserts, long stretches where nothing sticks, where doubt sets in. And then, every so often, I stumble onto an oasis. That's enough to get me moving again.

Before Mozart, I launched several projects. Not all of them finished, not all of them I'd own up to:

A Chrome extension to automate social-media replies via LLM. Not a bad idea, mediocre execution, zero distribution.
A sports platform built around events in France. Around 200 visitors a day, but zero paying customers so far. Alive, but small.

The lesson fits in one word: distribution.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams tells the story of a civilisation that has a brilliant idea: ship off everyone deemed "useless", salespeople, marketers, consultants, hairdressers… At first, everything's great. Fewer meetings. Less posturing. The planet feels better.

Then comes the boring detail: without those people, civilisation collapses. Moral of the story: never underestimate distribution… or hairdressers lol.

You can build without distributing for a while. But not forever.

The genesis: memory first

The first serious intuition wasn't actually about Mozart. It was a thought about memory.

I was sick of having to repeat the same context over and over.

From one prompt to the next, memory is very limited. From one LLM to another, it disappears entirely. You explain your project to ChatGPT, then you start over with Claude, then with a third tool.

Even when memory exists, it tends to stay opaque, frustrating, and hard to control.

The starting idea: build a universal memory layer, pluggable into any model. A space that belongs to you, that stores your notes, your code, your projects, and exposes itself to the LLMs of your choice.

I quickly realised the topic was far more complex than it looked: embeddings, entity graphs, retrieval… every path opened up new problems. And if people much more advanced than me are already working on it without a clear solution emerging, it's probably because it isn't that simple.

The idea didn't disappear: it became the first pillar of Mozart.

Then one evening, the second click. If multiple LLMs can share a common context, why stick to a single agent?

Every AI giant is pushing its own closed interface. ChatGPT has one, Claude has one. But none of them is designed to make several agents work together, from different models, on interconnected tasks, in parallel.

Mozart was born out of that void. A cockpit: you launch your agents, they each move forward on their own work, and you keep your hand on the whole thing.

First step: look at the competition. It exists, it's well-funded, further along. The first instinct is to get discouraged. But an empty market would be far more worrying.

Competitors prove one thing: the problem is real. Serious teams believe in it, investors too. But no one seems to have definitively cracked it yet.

The window is probably still open.

What is Mozart?

Here are the three founding pillars:

For developers (at first), Mozart is designed for technical profiles who work with files and code, and who like to configure their own tools.
Local-first & Markdown, your files live on your machine, readable by you, ideal for LLMs, easily synced via GitHub. Ultra-low latency and more privacy.
Multi-agent & extensible, orchestration will be the heart of the product. Coordinating agents, distributing tasks, aggregating results without depending on a single AI vendor. This logic will eventually extend beyond code (admin, ops, business).

Where things stand

Mozart isn't public yet. I'm building the MVP. Or rather an "MVP++", because I have this annoying tendency to over-polish, a real flaw when you know how important "talk to users" is. I'm working on it.

The next step is a beta with a few peers and early adopters, before opening up publicly ASAP.

I already know where my pain point will be: distribution. Knowing how to build, that's fine. Getting it known, that's another story.

Hello, world.

This is the English version of an article originally written in French. Originally published on mozart.build.

Turbocharge your Angular project: A config tutorial

Tim — Thu, 09 May 2024 17:56:45 +0000

Introduction

Welcome aboard, Angular aficionados! You've embarked on a journey to supercharge your Angular project with some configurations and tools I like to use.

In this tutorial, we'll guide you through setting up essential configurations, integrating handy tools, and optimizing your workflow for a smoother development experience. Get ready to elevate your Angular game to the next level!

Setting Up Your Angular Project

To kick things off, let's create a new Angular project using the Angular CLI.

Open your terminal and run the following command:

ng new your_project --minimal --standalone --package-manager=pnpm

This command initializes a new Angular project named 'your_project' with minimal setup (without tests) using standalone and 'pnpm' as the package manager (pnpm site). Ignore this flag if you prefer using npm or yarn.

Integrating Tailwind CSS

Tailwind CSS offers a utility-first approach to styling your applications. Let's integrate it into our project. Run the following commands in your terminal:

bashCopy code
pnpm install -D tailwindcss postcss autoprefixer
npx tailwindcss init

These commands install Tailwind CSS and its dependencies and initialize a Tailwind configuration file.

Add to your style.scss:

@tailwind base;
@tailwind components;
@tailwind utilities;

Don't forget to add to tailwind.config.js:

content: ['./src/**/*.{html,ts}']

Adding ESLint for Code Linting

Code quality matters! Let's add ESLint, a popular code linter, to our project. Execute the following command:

ng add @angular-eslint/schematics

This command integrates ESLint into your Angular project seamlessly.

Incorporating Prettier for Code Formatting

Next up, let's enhance code formatting using Prettier. Run the following command to install Prettier:

pnpm install -D prettier

Additionally, we need to prevent conflicts between Prettier and ESLint. Execute the following commands to install necessary plugins:

pnpm install -D prettier-eslint eslint-config-prettier eslint-plugin-prettier

Fine-tuning Tailwind CSS with Prettier

Tailwind CSS and Prettier can work harmoniously together. Let's ensure Tailwind classes are formatted correctly. Install the Tailwind Prettier plugin using the command:

pnpm install -D prettier-plugin-tailwindcss

Optimizing Configuration Files

Now, let's optimize our configuration files for a seamless development experience. Follow the steps below:

Add a .prettierignore file and copy-paste the contents of your .gitignore file into it.
Ignore node_modules in ESLint by echoing "node_modules" > .eslintignore into your terminal.
Verify and update your .eslintrc file with the provided JSON configuration.

{
  "root": true,
  "ignorePatterns": ["projects/**/*"],
  "overrides": [
    {
      "files": ["*.ts"],
      "extends": [
        "eslint:recommended",
        "plugin:@typescript-eslint/recommended",
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/recommended",
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/template/process-inline-templates",
        "plugin:prettier/recommended"
      ],
      "rules": {
        "@angular-eslint/directive-selector": [
          "error",
          {
            "type": "attribute",
            "prefix": "app",
            "style": "camelCase"
          }
        ],
        "@angular-eslint/component-selector": [
          "error",
          {
            "type": "element",
            "prefix": "app",
            "style": "kebab-case"
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "files": ["*.html"],
      "extends": [
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/template/recommended",
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/template/accessibility",
        "plugin:@angular-eslint/template/recommended"
      ],
      "rules": {}
    }
  ]
}

Enhancing Visual Studio Code Setup

Visual Studio Code is our development playground. Let's configure it for optimal productivity. Update your .vscode/extensions.json and .vscode/settings.json files with the provided configurations.

Add to .vscode/extensions.json to recommend and install extensions:

{
  "recommendations": [
    "angular.ng-template",
    "dbaeumer.vscode-eslint",
    "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
    "bradlc.vscode-tailwindcss"
  ]
}

Add to .vscode/extensions.json:

{
  "editor.formatOnSave": true,
  "eslint.validate": ["json"],
  "files.autoSave": "onFocusChange",
  "[html, scss]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
  },
  "[typescript]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "dbaeumer.vscode-eslint"
  },
  "search.exclude": {
    "**/node_modules": true,
    "**/dist": true},
  "files.exclude": {
    "node_modules/": true,
    "dist/": false,
    ".angular/": true}
}

The files.exclude true option helps to save memory during builds.

Optimizing Angular Schematics

Customize Angular schematics to generate elements in the format that interests us. Update your angular.json file with the provided schematics configurations.

"schematics": {
  "@schematics/angular:component": {
    "inlineTemplate": false,
    "inlineStyle": false,
    "style": "scss",
    "skipTests": true,
    "standalone": true,
    "changeDetection": "OnPush"
  },
  "@schematics/angular:class": {
    "skipTests": true},
  "@schematics/angular:directive": {
    "skipTests": true,
    "standalone": true},
  "@schematics/angular:guard": {
    "skipTests": true,
    "functional": true},
  "@schematics/angular:interceptor": {
    "skipTests": true},
  "@schematics/angular:pipe": {
    "skipTests": true,
    "standalone": true},
  "@schematics/angular:resolver": {
    "skipTests": true,
    "functional": true},
  "@schematics/angular:service": {
    "skipTests": true}
}

Adding Pre-commit Hooks and lint-staged

Ensure code quality before each commit using pre-commit hooks. Install Husky and lint-staged with the commands:

pnpm i -D husky lint-staged
npx husky init

Add at the end of your package.json:

"lint-staged": {
  "*.(ts|js|html|css|scss|json|md)": [
    "prettier --write"
  ],
  "*.(ts|js)": [
    "eslint --fix"
  ]
}

Then, update your .husky/pre-commit file with the provided script:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npx lint-staged

Implementing Commit Linting

Maintain a consistent commit message format with commitlint.

pnpm i D @commitlint/cli @commitlint/config-conventional

Create a commitlint.config.js file with the provided configuration.

touch commitlint.config.js

And add it:

module.exports = {
  extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional']
};

Additionally, update your .husky/commit-msg file with the provided script:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

npx --no -- commitlint --edit ${1}

Conclusion

Congratulations! You've successfully configured your Angular project with essential tools and optimizations. With Tailwind CSS for styling, ESLint and Prettier for code quality, and seamless integration of pre-commit hooks and commit linting, your development workflow is now smoother and more efficient than ever.

Let us know in the comments if there are any tools or configurations you like to use in your projects?

Happy coding!

🚀 Follow me on X.com or GitHub for more tips and updates on Angular development!

Un opérateur RXJS pour debugger avec élégance ?

Tim — Wed, 27 Sep 2023 17:26:29 +0000

Tous les développeurs utilisant RXJS qui ont voulu déboguer ont déjà fait :

obs$.pipe(tap((v) => console.log("data", v)))
// ou pour les plus malins.
obs$.pipe(tap(console.log))

C'est pas très fun. Pour y remédier, on va créer un opérateur personnalisé qui nous permettra d'avoir :

Plus sympa comme logs non ?
Pour l'utiliser, il suffit de le passer dans le pipe :

import { debug } from './custom.operators.ts'

obs$.pipe(debug("data"));

Côté implémentation, c’est simple :

export function debug<T>(tag = 'Untitled') {
  if (environment.production) {
    return tap<T>();
  }

  const t = tag[0].toUpperCase() + tag.slice(1);

  return tap<T>({
    next(value: T) {
      console.log(
        `%c[${t}: Next]`,
        'background: #84cc16; color: #fff; padding: 3px; font-size: 9px; font-weight: 500;',
        value
      );
    },
    error(error) {
      console.log(
        `%[${t}: Error]`,
        'background: #ef4444; color: #fff; padding: 3px; font-size: 9px; font-weight: 500;',
        error
      );
    },
    complete() {
      console.log(
        `%c[${t}]: Complete`,
        'background: #6b7280; color: #fff; padding: 3px; font-size: 9px; font-weight: 500;'
      );
    },
  });
}

En bonus, j'ai ajouté une petite ligne en haut pour ne pas logger en production.

Voilà :) Happy coding !

Unsubscribe, un jeu d’enfant avec takeUntilDestroyed

Tim — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 07:50:00 +0000

Avoir un moyen d'unsubscribe à une observable facilement ça vous dis ?

En effet, tout développeur Angular c’est un jour trouvé confronté à répéter du code pour unsubscribe à des observables qui ont été subscribes manuellement (c’est-à-dire sans utiliser le pipe async fourni par Angular qui s’occupe d’unsubscribe automatiquement à notre place).

Et oui, qui dit observable dit subscribe et qui dit subscribe dit unsubscribe ! Tout oubli d'unsubscribe implique une fuite de mémoire et les pertes de performance qui vont avec.

Unsubscribe peut vite devenir un processus répétitif qui va réduire la lisibilité de notre code. Mais ça c’était avant !

Depuis Angular v16 l'opérateur takeUntilDestroyed va nous permettre de nous simplifier la vie.

Pour l’utiliser, c’est simple, tu l’importes depuis @angular/core/rxjs-interop et tu le chaines à une observable. Par exemple :

import { takeUntilDestroyed } from '@angular/core/rxjs-interop';

@Component({ ... })
export class ExempleComponent {

  constructor() {
    interval(1000).pipe(takeUntilDestroyed()).subscribe(console.log);
  }
}

L'opérateur takeUntilDestroyed est conçu pour être utilisé à l'intérieur d'un contexte d'injection. C’est pourquoi il est utilisé dans le constructeur de ExempleComponent

Si tu souhaites utiliser l'opérateur en dehors d’un contexte d’injection, tu dois lui passer explicitement le fournisseur DestroyRef. Voici un exemple :

import { takeUntilDestroyed } from '@angular/core/rxjs-interop';

@Component({
  ...
})
export class ExempleComponent implements OnInit {
  private destroyRef = inject(DestroyRef);

  ngOnInit() {
    interval(1000).pipe(
      takeUntilDestroyed(this.destroyRef)
    ).subscribe(console.log);
  }
}

En conclusions, on a vu que l’opérateur takeUntilDestroyed nous permet de complete automatiquement et simplement un observable lorsque le contexte d'appel est détruit. Cela contribue donc à éviter les fuites de mémoire et améliore l’expérience de dev en apportant un code plus lisible.

Merci d'être ici 😇 n'oublier pas de liker, commenter ou partager ça m'aide à continuer de poster du contenu 👨🏻‍💻

L’option transform des inputs Angular 🪄

Tim — Sun, 23 Jul 2023 11:56:00 +0000

Depuis Angular v16.1.0, il existe une alternative facile à l’utilisation de setter et getter pour transformer les inputs.

Le décorateur @Input inclut désormais une option de transformation qui accepte une fonction permettant de transformer l'input avant de l'affecter à l'instance du composant (ou directive).

A quoi ça sert me direz-vous ?

Voici un premier exemple pour comprendre :

Imaginons que nous ayons un composant TowerComponent qui représente une tour (une simple div avec un gris en background 😅) le composant prend en input une hauteur.

function toNumber(value: string | number) {
    return isNumber(value) ? value : parseInt(value);
}

@Component({
    standalone: true,
    selector: 'app-tower',
    template: `<div class="tower"[style.height.px]="height"></div>`,
  styles: [`
    .tower {
      background: #555;
      width: 10px;
    }
  `]
})
export class TowerComponent {
    @Input({ transform: toNumber }) height: number;
}

Alors qu'avec le pattern setter/getter on aurait eu :

export class ButtonComponent {
 @Input()
 get height() {
    return this._height;
  }
 set height(value: string | number) {
    this._height = toNumber(value)
 }
 private _height = false;
}

Plus lisible avec transform n'est-ce pas ?

La fonction de transformation toNumber se chargera de la conversion, transformant ainsi la valeur de string en nombre.

Dans le composant parent on aura :

<app-tower height="42" />

C'est pas tout, Angular fournit également des fonctions utilitaires dans @angular/core permettant de couvrir les cas d’utilisation courant :

numberAttribute
booleanAttribute

On peut donc supprimer la fonction toNumber et refactoriser notre TowerComponent en :

export class TowerComponent {
    @Input({ transform: numberAttribute }) height: number;
}

Un autre scénario où cette fonctionnalité est pratique est lors de la manipulation d'attributs HTML.

Les attributs booléens sont considérés comme vrais s'ils sont présents sur un nœud DOM et comme faux s'ils sont omis.

Cependant, Angular interprète tous les attributs statiques comme des chaînes de caractères, ce qui entraîne souvent un problème. Par exemple, le code suivant disabled renverrait une chaîne vide :

@Component({
    standalone: true,
    selector: 'app-button',
    // ... 
})
export class ButtonComponent {
    @Input() disabled: boolean;
}

<app-button disabled />

L’utilisation de l’utilitaire booleanAttribute avec l’option de transformation permet de résoudre ce problème sans utiliser le pattern setter/getter.

@Component({
    standalone: true,
    selector: 'app-button',
    // ... 
})
export class ButtonComponent {
    @Input({ transform: booleanAttribute }) disabled: boolean = false;
}

La fonction de transformation booleanAttribute s’occupe de gérer la conversion en booléen. Grâce à ça, lorsque nous utilisons le composant ButtonComponent et que nous spécifions l'attribut disabled :

<app-button disabled />

La fonction de transformation interprétera correctement la présence de l'attribut comme vrai.

Pour conclure nous avons vu que l'option de transformation dans le décorateur @Input simplifie le processus de transformation d'Input, offrant une approche qui rend notre code plus lisible par rapport à l’approche traditionnelles. L'utilisation des fonctions numberAttribute et booleanAttribute nous permet de couvrir la majorité des cas d’utilisation.