Sam Newby

Learning in public

Becoming an
AI / ML engineer.

I'm a senior software engineer learning to build models from scratch. I'm documenting the experiments and mistakes along the way, with a goal of training my own TypeScript language model from scratch.

Latest from the journey

Following the error backwards

Implementing gradients for two hidden neurons made backpropagation feel less abstract.

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Other writing & notes

Systems & infrastructure Interactive essay

Understanding load balancing

How a request finds its way to the right server. A practical explanation, with a few things to try along the way.

Distributed systems

Why CAP Theorem is still important

CAP Theorem is still important in distributed systems, but I think we often talk about it in the wrong way.

In the margins

The trade-offs are still there

A cache is you deciding that stale data is okay for a bit. A queue is you deciding that work can happen later, and maybe more than once.

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