Hi! My name is Vlad Koltyshev (@FLStack).

For the past 6 years, I've been doing web development professionally. If you look at my resume, you'll see a classic path: I started in 2020 as a Junior Front-End Developer at the Belarusian company KNOMARY, then worked for the US market at ICIT Company, dove deep into Laravel at LeadPandaMedia, and built complex WordPress projects for European clients at DreamDev Agency and W8 Shipping.

Over these years, I've coded hundreds of pages, written thousands of lines of PHP, JavaScript, and Vue.js, integrated dozens of APIs, and solved endless optimization and SEO issues. I loved my job, but deep down, I always had a dream of creating my own product.

How did the idea for NexusConvert come about?

While working on client projects, I constantly faced the same routine:

A client sends a logo in a weird format — it needs to be converted.
A heavy video needs to be compressed for a landing page background.
I need to extract text from a PDF document or remove the background from a product photo.

Every time I googled for a converter, I was met with websites from the 2000s: overloaded with ads, watermarked, with strict size limits (only 10 MB free!), and terrifying designs.

I thought: "I'm a Full-Stack developer. Why shouldn't I build the perfect converter for myself and other professionals?"

Stepping out of my comfort zone

To create NexusConvert, I had to step outside my usual tech stack (PHP/WordPress/Laravel). I wanted to build an incredibly fast, modern, and secure ecosystem.

That's why I chose Next.js for a lightning-fast frontend and Python (FastAPI) for the backend. But I didn't stop at simple file conversion. I realized that the future belongs to artificial intelligence, so I integrated advanced neural networks into the platform:

Qwen 2.5 for document summarization and podcast generation.
Whisper for flawless subtitle extraction.
U-2-Net for background removal.

All of this runs on my own dedicated servers (Mac Mini and Linux machines) to ensure the security of user data and processing speeds in milliseconds. No third-party clouds — total privacy.

Why am I launching this blog?

I decided to develop NexusConvert using the Build in Public format. In this blog, I will:

Share architectural decisions and code snippets.
Talk about fuck-ups (believe me, there were many when we were configuring the Celery queue for hundreds of gigabytes).
Show how we evolve the project and introduce new features.

NexusConvert is more than just a converter. It's a tool built by a developer for developers, designers, and creators.

Thank you for being with us. There is a lot of work ahead, and I'm excited to share this journey with you!

Stay tuned, convert without limits, and see you in the next post!