💻 Solo Dev, €1M ARR

Hey everybody!

Alibaba is shaking things up AGAIN with Qwen3, a $8,000 bug wreaks havoc, and a Rails developer hits €1M solo. Plus, we dive into whether CS degrees still matter, and why computer architects can’t agree on how to measure performance.

Let’s dive in!

Quick Links

🤔 Alibaba launches open source Qwen3 model that surpasses OpenAI o1 and DeepSeek R1
Alibaba’s Qwen team just dropped the Qwen3 series, eight new open-source multimodal AI models that are seriously pushing the limits. Among them, two use a "mixture-of-experts" approach (popularized by Mistral), where only the necessary parts fire up based on the task. Performance is apparently Almost toe-to-toe with giants like OpenAI and Google, positioning Qwen3 as one of the most powerful publicly available models.

🧠 AI Engineer Roadmap
A step-by-step guide to becoming an AI engineer in 2025.

☠️ One line of code that did cost $8,000
A nasty bug in the Screen.studio app caused it to re-download a 250MB update file every 5 minutes, per user. Over time, this glitch stacked up to 9 million downloads and over 2 petabytes of traffic on Google Cloud. That’s 2 million gigabytes, all thanks to one rogue auto-update loop, costing Adam $8000.

🛤️ How I built a seven-figure business with Rails
Bram Jetten hit €1M ARR with PlanGo in 2022, built on one Rails codebase and one developer: himself. While his co-founder and support team drove growth and kept users happy, Bram alone handled everything technical, from backend to DevOps. He’s living proof of Rails’ “One Person Framework” philosophy in action.

🧑‍🎓 CS degrees, do they matter again?
Is a CS degree still worth it in 2025? Hacker News thinks… maybe. Degrees are often just filters, tools for overwhelmed recruiters to cut down massive resume piles. That story about tossing half in the trash? Brutal, but not far off. While you can get a legit CS degree for under $15K, the real question is whether it boosts your skills or your credibility, and for many, the answer depends on discipline and goals.

➗ Computer Architects Can't Find the Average
Computer architects are still debating over how to measure “average” system performance. The long-used geometric mean? Apparently flawed. A new paper by Eeckhout says it’s time to ditch it in favor of Equal-Work or Equal-Time Harmonic Speedup, which he claims give a more accurate picture. The debate’s been going on for years, and this writer thinks it’s all a bit overblown.

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More Reading

• Tiny LLM - a course of serving LLM on Apple Silicon for systems engineers.

• PyXL, a custom hardware processor that executes Python directly, no interpreter, no JIT, and no tricks. It takes regular Python code and runs it in silicon.

• How I built a seven-figure business with Rails.

• Anatomy Of A SQL Engine.

You (developer) are BIGGER than your Tech Job!

You need to think BIGGER than just your job or your employer.

You are the one with the superpower and can literally build whatever your mind can think up (and of course, people will want to pay for).

In this video, I want to give you 9 example apps to encourage you to start thinking more as a developer CREATOR and not just a developer SERVANT.

Until next week,

Travis.