A physicist's detour through enterprise software — and the 3-hour setup that brought me back to quantum mechanics.

I studied physics at Göttingen, the university where quantum mechanics was born.

In 1925, Werner Heisenberg wrote his foundational paper there as Max Born's assistant. Born recognized the matrix structure, Pascual Jordan formalized it, and their "Dreimännerarbeit" gave us the mathematical framework of matrix mechanics. I walked those same halls. Then I spent two decades building enterprise software, far from qubits and wavefunctions.

Last year — the centenary of Heisenberg's paper, celebrated worldwide as the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology — curiosity pulled me back. I started re-learning quantum computing from scratch.

And I ran straight into a wall. Not the physics. The tooling.

The 3-Hour Setup

I tried reproducing a quantum circuit from a research paper. The circuit itself was 15 lines of code. Getting it to run took 3 hours: framework version conflicts, missing dependencies, incompatible packages. I rewrote the whole thing in a different framework just to compare results.

3 hours of engineering for what should have been "run this, see the answer."

I looked for a place where I could just browse quantum circuits, click run, and see what happens. Somewhere with version history, so I'd know which framework version a circuit was tested on. Somewhere I could fork someone's implementation, modify it, and compare.

That place didn't exist.

What QubitHub Is

So I built one. Nights and weekends, over several months.

QubitHub is a free, browser-based tool for running quantum circuits. There are 50 curated circuits on it right now — from Bell states to VQE to Grover's search — across three frameworks: Qiskit (IBM), PennyLane (Xanadu), and Cirq (Google).

You can:

Browse circuits by category, framework, or qubit count
Run any circuit in the browser — no local install, no SDK setup, no cloud-provider credentials
Fork a circuit and modify it (free account required)
See version history — which code ran with which dependencies

Every circuit has a four-layer README: intuition, how it works, the math, and the implementation. Because "here's some code" isn't enough when you're learning.

Who This Is For

I built QubitHub for people like me — people who want to learn quantum computing by running real circuits, not by reading slides. Whether you're:

A student working through your first quantum algorithms course
A researcher who wants to reproduce a paper's circuit quickly
A developer curious about quantum computing but not ready to fight framework setup
A teacher looking for runnable examples to share with a class

If you've ever stared at a quantum circuit in a paper and thought "I just want to run this and see what happens" — that's the problem QubitHub solves.

What's Next

I'm still learning quantum computing. Every week I re-derive a circuit gate by gate, and every gap I find as a learner becomes a feature in the tool. The physicist in me is slowly catching up to the engineer who built it.

This blog is where I'll share what I learn along the way — the bugs I find, the circuits I build, and the surprises that come from actually running the code instead of just reading about it.

Next up: I Audited 50 Quantum Circuits. Here's What I Found. — a line-by-line review of every circuit on QubitHub, the bugs I caught, and what it taught me about quantum code quality.

If you work with quantum circuits — as a researcher, student, or just out of curiosity — I'd genuinely love your feedback. What's missing? What would make this useful for your workflow?

Try it at qubithub.co. DMs are open on X.

Nandan writes about learning quantum computing at qubithub.co/blog.