I’ve loved photography and cameras since the 90s. Back then, I subscribed to a print magazine simply called Photo (it’s long gone now). It was the dawn of Photoshop and digital editing, but the real magic was happening offline. Local film digitization shops were opening on every corner, and we were shooting everything on Kodak and Fujifilm.
My camera of choice? An old Soviet "FED" rangefinder. For film, the quality it produced was absolutely incredible.
Eventually, I grew up and went to university for computer networks and servers. I spent my days deep in Cisco and HP enterprise gear. Funny enough, I actually hated programming. Even in uni, I only wrote clunky Java scripts out of pure necessity for my own tasks. Back then, the idea that a machine could write code for you was pure sci-fi.
Fast forward to today. LLMs have entered the arena, easily matching the output of junior and mid-level developers. I looked at the massive archive of photos I’ve accumulated since childhood and had a thought: Wait, I have the sysadmin background for AWS and Cloudflare. I have AI agents to write the code I don’t want to write. Why not build my own stock photo marketplace?
That’s how Plënka was born (the name literally translates to film from Russian).
If you look at my tech stack, you might ask: Why on earth are you writing the backend in ultra-low-level C++23 and pushing the frontend AI to WASM?
The honest answer? Because they are blazingly fast—and because I simply don't have the VC money to pay for the massive, bloated infrastructure that the top stock monopolies use, haha.
So, does anyone want to hear what happens next?
Ah, well, I’m going to tell you anyway. In the next episode of this build-in-public journey, you’ll find out how I’m orchestrating this entire AI-driven development pipeline on a dying i5 laptop with 4 cores and 12GB of RAM.
P.S. I’m not really "working" on it, I’m mostly just suffering, haha.
Top comments (1)
Just to add some context: the 12GB laptop is literally overheating as I compile the tests. Anyone else bootstrapping on ancient hardware?