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World Congress 2026 Europe - Virtual Stage β€’ Jul 2, 2026 β€’ Session details

From Collecting Bottle Caps πŸ₯€to Building Vision πŸ‘€

Cosmin Marian Paduraru

How do you track 400 unique bottle caps? See how Cosmin turned a childhood hobby into a full-stack computer vision app using MobileNetv3 and a Pinecone vector database.

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#1 about 4 min

Building pet projects for fun and learning

How creating various software side projects fosters personal development and new technical skills.

#2 about 3 min

The origin of the bottle cap collection

Collecting and trading bottle caps served as a way to build friendships as an immigrant.

#3 about 3 min

Automating collection management with computer vision

Using computer vision helps identify whether a specific item already exists in a large physical collection.

#4 about 3 min

Applying Hough transform for circular object detection

Initial attempts to find circular objects in images using Hough transforms led to overlapping and false positives.

#5 about 9 min

Improving detection accuracy with image pre-processing

Resizing, color reduction via K-means clustering, and blob detection significantly reduce noise for machine processing.

#6 about 2 min

Refining object detection and handling overlapping

Calculating approximate blob sizes helps configure Hough transforms to filter out overlapping false positives.

#7 about 8 min

Identifying objects using vector databases and pre-trained models

Generating vector embeddings with MobileNetv3 and querying Pinecone enables fast and accurate similarity matching.

#8 about 4 min

Deploying the app and managing user feedback

Releasing a Flutter and Firebase app to a community brings valuable bug reports and user donations.

#9 about 3 min

Shutting down the project and evaluating success

Unexpected cloud billing changes forced the project's closure, but the technical and personal insights remain valuable.

Matching moments

3:37 min

Balancing developer productivity tools with digital nostalgia

Andrew MacLean Andrew MacLean +2 Β· LIVE

59 sec

Summarizing key takeaways for successful software side projects

Jonathan Fielding Β· LIVE

2:56 min

Reflecting on personal engineering side projects and initial creations

Jonathan Fielding Β· LIVE

3:36 min

Exploring machine learning and image classification in JavaScript

Carly Richmond Carly Richmond Β· World Congress 2025

1:15 min

Architecture of a multi-platform generative AI app

Mete Atamel Mete Atamel Β· World Congress 2024

2:05 min

Sharing side projects and embracing public feedback

Anna Oliveira Β· Coffee With Developers

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