Home on Vivek Kumar

Projects

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A selection of personal projects that I’ve built.

arXiv Search

A semantic search engine powered by Milvus, Node, Express, and React for finding arXiv papers via hybrid search.

I got interested in this project when I discovered the arXiv dataset on Kaggle and thought it would be interesting to use it with the Milvus vector database.

Stack: Node.js, Express.js, React, Python, Milvus
Features: Keyword + semantic search, efficient filtering, robust backend, and clean interface.
Links: GitHub Repository

Porchfest Mobile App

A group project we did for the Mobile Development class in 2022 to create a mobile app to assist first-time and returning Ithaca Porchfest attendees.

Windows Development Setup Guide

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Just as there is a guide for macOS here, this post will go over setting up the development environment on Microsoft Windows, specifically Windows 11.

Along with information from googling around, I also want to give kudos to Alex Ziskind’s video on the subject matter.

It’s a good reference that I used the last time I did this, so consider this post basically the textual (along with screenshots) version of that video to some extent, but focusing primarily on the bare essentials.

Setting Up Local LLMs on macOS

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In this post, I’ll go over how to set up local LLMs on macOS, though the same steps should also work on Windows if using Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). More on that in the next blog post, which will be about setting up Windows 11 for development!

There are some reasons why it might be nice to have local LLMs on your computer, and one reason is that it is completely yours. Cloud-based LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, etc, tend to be very limiting because you are subject to the company’s policies on what you can and can’t do with it. It also offers complete privacy, the ability to access it offline, and no billing or usage limitations.

macOS Development Setup Guide

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When I got this MacBook Pro 14" with 24 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage a few months ago, the first thing I wanted to do was to have a development setup that didn’t involve separate version managers for each programming language, running the risk of dependency hell, and constant frustration in managing those.

Things have changed a lot over the last few years since the last time I set up my workflow. Previously, I used a combination of miniconda, nvm, etc.

Brief Thoughts on Young Washington

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Happy 4th of July! 🎉 🦅 🇺🇸 🦅 🎉

What better way to celebrate than with a review of a movie made for this day, Young Washington, as my first-ever blog post!

The movie’s directed by Jon Erwin, and while I am not familiar with him, I recognized other members of the cast, namely Andy Serkis and Ben Kingsley.

I’ve heard about this movie from the trailer on YouTube, and it intrigued me. The last time I ever saw a historical film was way back in 2017, when I first moved here to Ithaca, NY, and it was Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk.