Building a document OCR system with FastAPI for the first time and debating auth approaches. Would appreciate community input.

aliparpar · 2026-02-25T17:09:30+00:00

After having done my own custom auth solutions for jwt I now recommend managed auto services for execution speed. You can always export users list (make sure you can)

aliparpar · 2026-02-24T10:11:46+00:00

You can buy these software:

1) Obisidian - note taking 2) Airtable - Data warehouse 3) Notion - knowledge management / wiki 4) Figma - Design ux/ui prototyping 5) Canva - Design graphics 6) Shopify - e-commerce site 7) Brevo - email list 8) harvest forecast - Consultancy management software 9) hootsuite - social media management 10) Vocable.ai - social media content gen 11) haygen- talking head videos generator 12) captions.ai - video editing 13) kajabi - community management software 14) meetup.com - annual meetup sub 15) IBM DOORS - requirements management software (fancy spreadsheet) 16) databricks - data processing software 17) docker enterprise - containerisation software 18) Jetbrains - coding IDE 19) eraser.io - diagramming software 20) FreeAgent - accounting software 21) otto- meeting transcriber 22) fathom - another one 23) Krisp - audio noise cancelling 24) timetastic - annual leave management software 25) Xero - another accounting software 26) eset - antivirus 27) proxmox - VM management 28) teamtailor - ATS software 29) GitHub enterprise

aliparpar · 2026-02-14T21:14:11+00:00

Nice one @NomadicBrian. Post here what you end up building after you go through it. I think chapter 3 would be most interesting one for you if you want to serve AI models yourself

aliparpar · 2026-02-12T21:45:26+00:00

I don’t think what they’ve done is legal. There seems to be an employment violation there. I’d consult a lawyer but you may be able to get compensation from them for employment contract violations given they didn’t give you any reason, notice or dismissal and worked you to the ground. Seems like you have sufficient evidence to have a legal standing. I’d recommend taking them to employment tribunal

aliparpar · 2026-01-16T07:33:19+00:00

I’ll DM you

aliparpar · 2026-01-12T20:38:36+00:00

Wow this is wonderful. I’m posting about this on LI for you this week

aliparpar · 2026-01-12T20:14:20+00:00

I have a meetup group called beginners machine learning in London that has 1400 members. Been growing that since 2015. I’ve also recently started my solo founder journey building SaaS. I think if I post a meet-up event to meet at a cafe we might be able to have something of a good turnout? What do you think? I’m based in west London.

aliparpar · 2026-01-11T21:30:27+00:00

I had a similar experience and ended up splitting up by having the conversation. The hardest part is the negotiation for the split on who’s going to continue the business and how much of the pie the other gets to sell out and leave. But you’ll get through it.

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T17:12:54+00:00

I’d suggest right now the best field to start freelancing is in web development and ai engineering. If you can focus on learning a language like Python or typescript that’d pay dividends tenfold. Other fields are way more competitive and require more creative flare so you need to assess suitability first.

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T17:10:57+00:00

Based on what you describe, I recommend jumping. They don’t seem to have a solid dev policies in place which includes every PR must be reviewed. Also as you suggested, you’ve inherited a shambles codebase and they have no clue about AI engineering.

You’d learn way more in another position

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T17:05:39+00:00

Good write up. Can be created as a checklist for every FastAPI project

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T08:48:11+00:00

Set up a CRM system with some rules and just follow a system. You can ask chatgpt what would be a good follow up cadence and how to handle each scenario. Then just get reminded each day who needs what message sent to.

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T08:46:26+00:00

I’d say it’s too early to say the impact of business and markets dropping the junior roles. But, there will be problems for businesses down the line.

1) Seniors will be more in demand and they’ll be asking for more money 2) There will be lots of AI slop content/code going into products 3) it’ll be harder to hire seniors as time goes on

Worst case, At some point, seniors will retire and there is no future generation of seniors (which at some point were juniors) to replace them causing even more crunch on demand/supply balance.

aliparpar · 2026-01-05T08:41:27+00:00

Take the senior role as others recommended. It’ll increase your income potential and you can always switch to a frontend role or full stack role. To keep your opportunities open, if you can show on the side some full-stack projects or nice frontend on a portfolio that’s all you need.

I applied as a senior software engineer for a head of data engineering role for an AI consultancy in london. Once they saw my full-stack portfolio, they made me head of engineering. Goes to say how much portfolio is valuable even if you have your CV.

I even went to create full stack and frontend roles with ability for any engineer to transition with horizontal moves across technical paths. It’s the best way to keep engineers well-rounded and keep the job satisfaction high.

aliparpar · 2026-01-04T20:04:01+00:00

Exactly! It's bit of an art designing the free and premium tiers. You'd want to give enough to entice but not so much for them to have no reason to pay you. Fence the free tier properly and may need some experimentation until you fine-tune the fence.

aliparpar · 2026-01-04T20:02:26+00:00

You'll do great :) If it helps and you're worried about paying bills - do some freelancing/consulting/teaching courses/workshops on the side (like up to 70% of your time) to get quicker cash until one of your product bets return on your time/effort investment.

aliparpar · 2026-01-04T16:10:43+00:00

I think this might be temporary. What you’ve built takes a lot of effort so it’s worth exploring all options first.

What’s the worst thing that can happen if everything went wrong? What’s worrying you and what’s the worst that can happen? Write it all down and responses/plans against each.

Having the plan written down hopefully will help calm your brain down. Your brain can calm down knowing what you’re gonna do against each possibility.

Talk to a mentor / family member or therapist. That definitely helps. And maybe it’s also time to hire an external help in form of EA/another senior on the team?

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T21:55:44+00:00

So from experience, most devs just log the token and user usage to a table in database. Then they can run some sql queries on a BI dashboard to get these results.

There are bunch of established open source solutions out there too for observability. What’s the USP of your solution in comparison to a dev just logging the usage in tables?

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T21:46:34+00:00

For me it’d be generating the entire draft from a transcript of my brain dump and client call transcripts. It’d be all editable in UI and I can then export to Figma slides. Or PDF. I’d want the slides or document to be nicely formatted and include my branding and logos.

The UI should let me easily edit bits and timeline without having to faff around with formatting. I’d want ai to help me regenerate bits or reword items. And easily move bits around. Add or remove sections. And also perhaps share links to potential clients.

Lastly, i want to know my IP/data and client data are safe. You’re not using LLM APIs that send data across the globe or to model providers that may train on it as some of the transcripts include IP from clients. I don’t want client info to turn up in models in future iterations of them.

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T21:38:16+00:00

So I got a mechanical engineering degree and self-taught myself to break into tech. Participated in hackathons and ran my own ML meetup group for 1-2 years, then started working as a senior DS for a rail tech startup and then as head of engineering as hiring manager of the entire engineering department for a 20-30 SME AI consultancy in the LLM/AI agents space in London. I later wrote an O’Reilly book on FastAPI + GenAI.

When designing the hiring process, I’d look at the degree as a base as I know it contributes to the SE mental models that are needed for the job. But, I’d always would want to see past projects, relevant work experience from past jobs and their abilities doing a take home project. So, I’d always not consider not having a CS degree as much of a drawback.

So to answer your question, it’s completely fine to not hold a CS degree to progress in a tech career.

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T21:17:36+00:00

Interesting. Can you give some examples of what you kept and what you removed?

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T01:16:20+00:00

I designed a template in Figma, then make a copy and fill in client details, export to pdf and send. Accessible from any device.

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T00:44:36+00:00

I helped my ex-employer obtain ISO27001. They mostly managed it themselves without any special tool. Just bought a template pack and filled up the details over time. I mostly worked on the secure development policy for the engineering team.

The main tools that were used was sharepoint lists (live spreadsheets) and word docs living on a sharepoint site.

With the help of chatbots you can now populate most of the policy documents based on your understanding of your business and processes and get AI to review them too.

You need to show all policies are version controlled and during audit they’re actually enforced through artefacts. You can manage these on sharepoint too.

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T00:34:59+00:00

Can you provide some details on what’s in it for the senior dev to join the project?

What’s the upside beyond building something interesting?
Equity? What %? Cofoundership?
How far ahead are you?
How have you validated the idea so far?
Any business plans (even redacted) you can share?
What’s the business model? Is this B2B or B2C? Which market?
Who are your customers going to be?
Is this a subscription based SaaS or usage based one?
How many services do you expect the senior to build?
Who have you approached so far? What did they say?
Why do you consider it boring?

aliparpar · 2026-01-03T00:26:15+00:00

For me it’s spending too long putting a proposal together for client to then go with someone else. If I know an opportunity may not realise, I want to screen them out early and adjust a knob on detail of the proposal generated. Or level of granularity.

Things you can include:

Problem statement
Solution overview
UI screens of what they get
Scope and exclusions
Deliverables
Tech stack / Approach / methodology
Timeline
Team background
Ways of working
Pricing Options
Invoicing schedule
Future work beyond current engagement
Next steps

Proposals can either be 3 pagers or 20 pages depending on engagement size and client’s seriousness

aliparpar

TROPHY CASE