Recent content on Fail. Learn. Repeat.
This year I’ve been designing homework assignments for an ML course at Skoltech (Russia’s answer to MIT/Caltech for science and technology). After bombing more job interviews than I care to count, I think I’ve finally figured out what I was personally missing during my studies - a deep understanding of a relatively small set of fundamental algorithms. Well, my pain is the next…
We are reading “ Ultra-scale playbook ”. Together! Hello fellow ML geeks, my name is Andrey. Each day, I understand more about how little I know. Time to cover another gap - scaling LLM training. Most of the time I just plug in a library or ask an expert colleague. And… I still want to do the same thing, but finally have a much better grasp on what is going on under the hood.…
TL;DR This summer I did not get into any of a bunch of research programs and schools. After crying into my pillow, I remembered someone smart saying that knowledge isn’t something you’re given ; you have to take it. That seemed like a bright idea, so I am starting my own summer-ish school / research-padawan community with blackjack and hookers . An educational-research collective for…
Anthropic – those dudes behind Claude . It’s an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by some seriously massive investments from Amazon. Rumor has it they’ve got a model even more powerful than OpenAI’s o3, but they’re so obsessed with safety (which is a great thing!) that they still keep it private. What I applied for: Research Fellowship . And here’s something unusual: they asked for reference…
For 7 years I happily played with web. For 6 months I was burning out. Next 2 quarters I tried to reassemble myself, looked for the meaning in life and fantasized how I would switch from SWE to AI on a whim . After 3 more months, I have made barely any progress. At this pace, my first proper research publication is going to be written by my child in 30-ish years, and not me. Something has got to…
Once upon a time, there was a boy who loved building websites. He also enjoyed sharing his findings at conferences. Then he moved from the middle of nowhere to London. Started working in the company of his dreams. 18 months later he collapsed hard, to a point where he wanted to throw his laptop out of a window and roam the mountains of Scotland indefinitely. After 3 more months, he figured it all…
Did you always think various “talent” immigration programs imply a Nobel prize? I am going to tell you how a regular software engineer from the middle of nowhere could get a talent visa in the UK based on my personal experience. In this post we will cover: How a software engineer could get in the UK Key differences between talent and skilled worker programs What documents and evidence…
I’ll tell you: How I got into Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program while working and living in Russia. Requirements to enroll for foreign students. How much it costs. My experience with the courses. Why I am still pursuing the degree even after I started working at Facebook. Who Hiya! ℹ️ My name is Andrey G. I am a software engineer from London,…
Yet another story of how an ordinary guy from the middle of nowhere in Russia managed to get multiple FAANG offers. This time, in Europe. I’ll tell you a little about my background, share several tips and tricks that helped me to land the interviews and prepare for them, talk about the interviewing process, reveal my final choice. TL;DR. Sent hundreds of CVs. Solved 100 challenges on…
Recently, at Hazelcast we have migrated our Management Center to TypeScript. Not just TypeScript, but the strictest TypeScript there is. If you are interested in why we decided to enable all the strict flags and benefits they provide, welcome to this post. Prelude 50k lines of JavaScript code of a React app. A small team of 2, later 3. 166 bugs filed from 2018-04-24 to 2019-04-23. On average, we…
So, you have decided to move your ass someplace else, seeking a better life. The whole world is at your feet, but “the whole world” is not a specific place where you can be. You have to choose, if not a city, at least a country. Nowadays, there are plenty of places where your career can skyrocket, and you can have a great quality of life. Of course, it depends on your definition of the…
Large scale equals distributed. Distributed equals inevitable complexity. Complexity at runtime equals extensive monitoring. At Hazelcast, doing distributed systems well is our bread and butter. It means we have no choice but to be huge fans of collecting all kinds of metrics to stay on guard of the data our users trust us with. In Management Center 4.2020.08 , we drastically changed the model of…
Have you heard about “lifting state up”? I guess you have and that’s the exact reason why you’re here. How could it be possible that one of the 12 main concepts listed in React official documentation might lead to poor performance? Within this article, we’ll consider a situation when it’s indeed the case. Step 1: Lift it up I suggest you to create a simple game…
node-config has been serving the Node.js community as pretty much the default config solution for many years. Its simplistic, yet powerful design helped it to spread like a virus across multiple JS libraries. Yet those very design choices don’t always play nice with new strictly-typed kids on the block. Like TypeScript. How could we keep using our favorite config tool and stay on the…
How many times did you write logger.info('ServiceName.methodName.') and logger.info('ServiceName.methodName -> done.') for each and every method of your service you wanted to log? Would you like it to be automated and has the same constant signature across your whole app? If that’s so, we’re very much alike, we have suffered the same pain too many times, and now we could finally try to…
What’s nagging you the most when you think about logging in NodeJS? If you ask me I’m gonna say lack of of industry standards for creating trace IDs. Within this article we’ll overview how we can create these trace IDs (meaning we’re going to briefly examine how continuation local storage a.k.a CLS works) and dig deep into how we can utilize Proxy to make it work with ANY…
What are we gonna cover here? We’re going to overview evolution of reducers in my Redux/NGRX apps that took place over the last two years. Starting from vanilla switch-case , going to selecting a reducer from an object by key, finally settling with class-based reducers. We’re not going to talk only about how, but also about why. If you’re interested in working around too much…
What are we gonna cover here? Several ways/tips/tricks/ancient black magic rituals to reduce boilerplate in our overwhelmed-with-boilerplate Redux (and NGRX!) apps I came up with over the years of first-hand production experience. Let me be honest with you, guys. I wanted to speak just about my new micro-library flux-action-class at first, but it seems like everybody’s been complaining how…
A tale of how we thoughtlessly used a boilerplate with a whole arsenal of dependencies for a project, which nobody used in the end, how it haunted us after, when Edge support was requested, and how we heroically resolved what we had broken before. Wait, it’s way too long. A tale of how all browsers are attributophobes, with a select few standing out. A little history first A colleague of…