Recent content in Hi! I’m Alex. on Alex Kim's blog
If you used LLMs for coding before the coding agents (~prior to Claude Code release in Feb last year), and if you got annoyed with typing the same context into LLM chat boxes, you’d start saving it into per-project markdown files. Many of those who used LLMs heavily ended up doing this eventually. Then we got Claude Code and other agents, and by mid-summer, this technique got formalized as…
I find Reddit is one of the best sources for practical cooking tips. I’m subscribed to a few cooking subreddits, and every once in a while I come across something curious enough to try. Most of the time the advice works wonders. I decided to give an AI agent a task: explore Reddit’s cooking and baking communities for useful, unconventional tips that are highly upvoted and…
A large percentage of people I hang out with work in tech. Most of them have only ever known salaried 9-to-5 jobs. Every few months, someone asks me how I ended up doing independent consulting. These conversations have become more frequent in the last year or so. AI-driven (or at least AI-justified) layoffs have tech workers worried about job security for the first time in a while. None of the…
Update: see HN discussions about this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47586778 I use Claude Code daily, so when Chaofan Shou noticed earlier today that Anthropic had shipped a .map file alongside their Claude Code npm package, one containing the full, readable source code of the CLI tool, I immediately wanted to look inside. The package has since been pulled, but not before the code was…
Tired of accidentally committing to work repos with your personal email? Here’s how to automatically use the right Git profile based on where your repositories live. 1. Generate SSH Keys Create separate keys for each account: # Work key ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'work@company.com' -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519_work # Personal key ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'personal@gmail.com' -f…
This week the new Trump administration announced new tariffs on key trading partners, Canada and Mexico. Both countries vowed to retaliate, and tensions are high: “Canada imposes 25% tariffs in trade war with US” Living in Canada, I am obviusly curious about the impact this will all have both both sides of the border. I am a self-described economics nerd: having never studied…
Training and fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) requires significant computational resources and careful experiment tracking. While many focus on the modeling aspects, efficiently managing compute resources and experiment tracking is equally important for successful ML projects. This guide demonstrates how to use SkyPilot and MLflow , two open-source tools, to orchestrate LLM fine-tuning…
I am preparing for my CKAD (Certified Kubernetes Application Developer) exam. Below is the mental model of K8S concepts that helps me understand Kubernetes. Hope it helps you too. The Big Picture: Kubernetes as an Orchestrator What is Kubernetes? Kubernetes is an automation system for deploying and managing containerized applications at scale. Rather than manually handling each container, you…
SLURM (Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management) is an open-source workload manager designed to schedule and manage jobs on large clusters. In the world of LLMs, SLURM has seen a resurgence in popularity due to the increased demand for training large models and scaling them to multiple nodes. This guide will introduce the fundamental concepts of SLURM, common commands and script structures,…
Intro This notebook (also on github ) demonstrates how to use Function Calling functionality with the OpenAI API. In this demo, we’ll use the Northwind database to convert natural language queries into SQL: 'What is the total revenue for each product in the database?' -> -> 'SELECT ... FROM ...' -> DataFrame There will be two function calling examples: A simple one-step function call to…
Introduction - Solving cloud resources and reproducibility for LLMs A few of weeks ago, I wrote a post about the challenges of training large ML models, in particular: the need for more computing power and the complexity of managing cloud resources; the difficulty of keeping track of ML experiments and reproducing results. There I proposed a solution to these problems by using SkyPilot and DVC to…
When you’re trying to wrap your head around challenging new ideas, your natural instinct may be to chip away at it in several attempts. Read a bit, take a break, come back later - like attacking a mountain ascent in short sprints. This may feel like you’re making progress, but you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. Every time you re-engage with the difficult material,…
Introduction One of the things that makes machine learning hard is that you have to run a lot of experiments. You have to try different models, different data sets, different hyperparameters, different features. And each experiment can take a long time to run, especially if you’re working on deep learning problems. You can’t just run them on your laptop or desktop. You need more computing power,…
Paul Graham once wrote that “a startup is a company designed to grow fast.” For a startup to grow fast, especially a B2B startup selling SaaS products to other companies, it needs sales engineers. Sales engineers are the technical experts who work closely with sales teams. They exist because selling enterprise software requires deep technical knowledge that salespeople typical…
We (esp. those in the tech industry) have an instinctual aversion to pedagogy. “Those who can’t do, teach” the old saying goes. But the truth is the opposite. Teaching does not indicate an inability to do something. On the contrary, teaching empowers and enables ability. It is the highest form of understanding. When you teach something, you gain a deeper mastery over the subject…
Dad | ML Engineer | Technical Instructor | Consultant | Community Builder Hi! I’m Alex. I am an ML engineer by trade and a physicist by degree. I’ve lived in different parts of the world and am currently based in Montreal, 🇨🇦. I speak English, Russian, French and Spanish. I am also a husband and a dad of two 👧🏻👦🏻. Most of my recent work sits at the intersection of MLOps and generative AI -…
Slides 🖼️ Week 1: ML project lifecycle and MLOps best practices Learning objectives Understand the core philosophy behind MLOps ideas Apply best practices for establishing ML project structure and dependencies management Manage project dependencies with pip and virtualenv Version datasets with DVC Project Introduction Problem Description and Dataset This dataset contains 10,000 records, each of…
Slides 🖼️ Week 2: ML Pipelines, Reproducibility and Experimentation Learning objectives Refactor a Jupyter notebook into a reproducible ML pipeline Version artifacts of an ML pipeline in a remote storage Iterate over a large number of ML experiments in a disciplined way Steps Refactor Jupyter notebook in a DVC pipeline Docs: https://dvc.org/doc/start/data-pipelines Create the following files to…
Slides 🖼️ Week 3: CI/CD for ML Learning Objectives Learn the basics of CI/CD Leverage the power of CI/CD tools for ML projects with CML Integrate an ML model into the FastAPI framework Build and test a Docker container running a web API service Deploy the resulting Docker container to cloud Steps Introduction to GitHub Actions and CML Introduction to GitHub Actions Introduction to CML CI/CD:…
Slides 🖼️ Week 4: Data Drift Monitoring for ML Projects Learning Objectives Distinguish between application monitoring and ML monitoring Use Alibi Detect framework to detect data drift Steps Introduction to Data Drift Monitoring What’s data drift and why do we need to monitor for it? Intro to Alibi Detect Add Churn_Modelling_Germany.csv to data/more_data/ Churn_Modelling_Germany.csv Add…
I am available for consulting and training engagements. Organizations I’ve worked with include: McKinsey & Company , Concordia Bootcamps , Splunk , BloomTech , TripleTen , O’Reilly Media , Iterative.ai , Platacard.mx , Nebius , Grainger and others. Client testimonials Anton Tarasenko , Co-founder and CBPO of Platacard.mx :