ThatTechBro (🛠,🚀)

My Journey So Far 😩🔥 I started tech in January 2022… not knowing how far it would take me. Since then: - Mastered 13+ programming languages 🤫 - Landed my first tech job at 18 (Fintech) - Made my first $1k at 19 (Freelancing) - Launched my startup at 20 — collan.dev 🚀 - Now working with 2 fintech companies you never know how life will take you until you start 💜 Above all, I’m grateful to God for how far I’ve come 🙏🏻🔥 This is just the beginning.

Hi guys, I built an open-source alternative to @pewbeam_ai in one week. github.com/openbezal/rhema Started coding during a Sunday church service. By the following Sunday, we were using it live during our church service. Wild. Here's what Rhema does: it listens to your pastor's sermon in real-time, detects Bible verse references as they're mentioned, and displays them on screen instantly. No manual clicking, no dedicated slide operator needed. The tech stack: - Tauri 2.0 with a Rust backend handling all the heavy lifting: audio capture, transcription pipeline, verse detection logic, and system tray integration - Local AI embeddings using Qwen3-0.6B so everything runs on-device with zero cloud dependency. Your sermons never leave your machine - Real-time audio transcription paired with semantic search against a full Bible verse database The Rust backend was a deliberate choice. We needed low latency audio processing and efficient memory usage for running an embedding model locally, and Rust delivers on both. Is it perfect? Probably not. But the core functionality works and we're already using it in a real church environment This is where you come in. Rhema is fully open source and we need contributors to help take it to the next level. Whether it's improving the verse detection accuracy, adding multi-language support, building a better overlay UI, adding support for more Bible translations, or optimizing the transcription pipeline, there's real work to be done and real impact to be made. If you're a Rust developer, a frontend engineer, an ML enthusiast, or just someone who loves building tools for the church, come build with us. Star the repo. Fork it. Open a PR. Let's make this the go-to open-source solution for live Bible verse display in churches worldwide. github.com/openbezal/rhema

I’ve been seeing a lot of frustration from people who didn’t even participate in the @injectiveafr Builderthon, especially in the comments and on the timeline. I want to take a moment to give some real clarity what was actually submitted, and why some of those projects didn’t make even it to top 4. Even though some of the reactions feel a bit targeted, I think this is a good opportunity to share a deeper perspective. Using this as a case study to understand a bigger issue why many Africa-focused hackathons struggle to produce long-term builders, even after rewards are shared. I’m open enough to share this insight because I’ve got a reputation to protect.