In September 2024, I shared a milestone: Shamim Bhuiyan and I were writing together again, seven years after our book on Apache Ignite. I had missed the collaboration.
The new project was a hands-on guide to building AI applications. In the original announcement, I called it Getting Started with Generative AI. Readers of this website will find it under Generative AI with Local LLM.
A different subject, a familiar collaboration
Apache Ignite and local language models belong to different parts of the technical landscape. What connected the projects for me was the opportunity to turn engineering work into something another developer could learn from.
Writing together also meant sharing the work of explaining it. A technical idea can make sense in conversation and still need considerable care before it works on the page. Collaboration gives that explanation another reader while it is still being formed.
My original post was mostly an announcement and a thank-you. That remains the right centre of this note. The milestone was not simply adding another title to a list; it was returning to a working relationship I valued.
A practical route into the subject
The book focuses on building with local language models, with material intended for developers who want to connect the concepts to applications. The accompanying website provides the current description and ways to find the book.
I would rather point readers to that maintained information than preserve an old social-media announcement as if it were a current specification of every chapter or tool version.
The original post also thanked colleagues who were sharing their own work on AI. That sense of exchange was part of the appeal: learning, building, and making the results available to other people.
Thank you to Shamim for the collaboration, and to the readers who have followed the work from distributed computing into AI.
See the books or visit the Generative AI with Local LLM website.