Blog

Notes on building AI systems, tools, and things I learn along the way.

Follow Your Passion? Maybe That's the Wrong Question

"Follow your passion" is the default career advice. I used to buy it too: figure out what you love, then go build a career around it.

Attention Mechanisms and the Transformer Architecture, Explained

Every LLM you've used runs on this idea. Attention is the mechanism that lets a model figure out which parts of the input actually matter for the prediction...

Deep Learning Basics with PyTorch: Neural Networks, Training, and Optimization

A neural network doesn't know anything when you create it. Every weight starts random. Everything it "learns" comes from a loop: make a prediction, measure h...

Dimensionality Reduction: PCA, NMF, and Sparse Data

More features isn't always better. A dataset with hundreds of columns often has a much smaller "true" structure hiding inside it, plus a bunch of noise that...

Unsupervised Learning: K-Means, Hierarchical Clustering, and t-SNE

No labels, no "right answer" to check against. Unsupervised learning is about finding structure in data when nobody's told you what the structure is supposed...

Machine Learning Fundamentals: Model Evaluation, Hyperparameter Tuning, Missing Data, and Scaling

Training a model is the easy part. The stuff that actually separates a working model from a broken one: picking the right metric, tuning it properly, handlin...

Hashing vs. Cryptography: SHA, SimHash, and Diffie-Hellman Explained

Here's SHA, SimHash, and Diffie-Hellman, and where each one actually gets used.

Fourier Transforms, Parallel Algorithms, Bloom Filters, and Linear Programming: A Quick Map of the Territory

Not every algorithm fits into "sort this" or "find the shortest path." Some solve completely different problems: breaking a signal into its parts, running wo...

How Search Engines Actually Find Things: Inverted Index, TF-IDF, and KNN

Type a word into a search bar and get results in under a second, out of billions of documents. That's not magic. It's a handful of data structures doing very...

5 Algorithms Every Developer Should Actually Understand (Not Just Memorize)

You don't need to memorize every algorithm out there. You need to know which tool fits which problem, and be able to explain why.