Recent content on Bart de Goede
Seven years ago I used Google's text-to-speech API to create audio versions of my posts. Now I can run an 82-million-parameter open weight model locally on my laptop, for free.
This blog now has semantic search that runs entirely in your browser. No server, no API keys, no 23 MB transformer. The whole model is a 4 MB lookup table, and extends the existing keyword search with semantic capabilities.
The all-you-can-eat AI coding era is over. So what do you do on the 22nd of the month, when the token budget's gone and there's over a week of work left? Here's a local coding agent (Pi plus Qwen3-Coder on a MacBook) that's decent enough for the routine stuff and runs for free (if you have enough RAM).
Everyone's building AI agents that send emails and book flights. How about one that fights monsters in a dungeon? Here's how you can too.
Our keyword search engine can't find 'alcoholic beverage disaster in England' even though the London Beer Flood is right there. In this post, we add semantic search using sentence-transformers embeddings and cosine similarity to find documents by meaning, not just matching words.
A few years ago I wrote a full-text search engine in 150 lines of Python. The Wikipedia data source it relied on has since been discontinued, and the tooling around it was showing its age. I wanted to (finally) write a follow-up about semantic search, but I realized that I had to get the old repository in a working state first. It's now using Hugging Face (🤗) datasets, uv, ruff, pytest, and…
I haven't really touched my blog since 2019. The theme was ancient, jQuery was everywhere, and I kept putting off the inevitable migration. Then I decided to let an LLM do it. Here's what happened when Claude Code spent an evening trying to modernize my setup.
Full-text search is everywhere. From finding a book on Scribd, a movie on Netflix, toilet paper on Amazon, or anything else on the web through Google (like [how to do your job as a software engineer](https://localghost.dev/2019/09/everything-i-googled-in-a-week-as-a-professional-software-engineer/)), you've searched vast amounts of unstructured data multiple times today. What's even more amazing,…
Audio is big. Like really big, and growing fast, to the tune of 'two-thirds of the population listens to online audio' and 'weekly online listeners reporting an average nearly 17 hours of listening in the last week'. These numbers include all kinds of audio, from online radio stations, audiobooks, streaming services and podcasts (hi Spotify!). It makes sense too. Consuming audio content is easier…
I've been using Lunr.js to enable some basic site search on this blog. Lunr.js requires an index file that contains all the content you want to make available for search. In order to generate that file, I had a kind of hacky setup, depending on running a Grunt script on every deploy, which introduces a dependency on node, and nobody really wants any of that for just a static HTML website.
Almost all modern browsers enable websites to customize the built-in search feature to let the user access their search features directly, without going to your website first and finding the search input box. If your website has search functionality accessible through a basic GET request, it’s surprisingly simple to enable this for your website too.
GitHub Pages has just become even more awesome. Since yesterday 1 , GitHub Pages supports HTTPS for custom domains . And yes, it is still free!
GitHub Pages is pretty awesome. It lets you push a bunch of static HTML (and/or CSS and Javascript) to a GitHub repository, and they’ll host and serve it for you. For free!
Bloom filters are cool. In my experience, it’s a somewhat underestimated data structure that sounds more complex than it actually is. In this post I’ll go over what they are, how they work (I’ve hacked together an interactive example to help visualise what happens behind the scenes) and go over some of their usecases in the wild.
Like many software engineers, I figured I needed a blog of sorts, because it would give me a place for my own notes on “How To Do Things™”, let me have a URL to give people, and share my ramblings about Life, the Universe and Everything Else with whoever wants to read them.
Hi! My name is Bart de Goede. I live in New York City and I’m the Engineering Manager for AI Commerce & Search at StubHub , helping fans find tickets to their favorite live events. I’ve also been a member of the technical staff at Perplexity AI , building the most powerful knowledge tool on the web, search engineering lead at OnFrontiers , where I helped organizations understand the…