Recent content on derekrodriguez.dev
Alexis King’s Parse, don’t
validate 
had a huge impact on how I write code, particularly my stance toward Python
type annotations in production. However, as someone who has written practically
zero Haskell, the idea didn’t click for me until I started seeing other
examples, like this one in Rust .
This post explores how we can take this paradigm and apply…
Web applications like EDHRec and TappedOut’s Deck Space
visualizer (unfortunately an account is needed to use it) are really cool
examples of applying machine learning to have more fun in the real world. For many
interesting applications of machine learning to my daily life, the bottleneck is getting access to good data, which I am often far too lazy or understimulated to…
This post walks through the current and future scope of a sensor monitoring
platform I am building. The motivation to build this platform was to produce a
creative and useful gift for my wonderful partner on Valentine’s Day. This writeup
will cover my decisions for each part of the system, and some general snippets that
would be useful for someone interested in building…
I ran into an interesting quirk while parsing some text today. Before I dive
in, let’s establish some background. I’m parsing some comma-delimited data from
a text file that looks like this: 
…
The What and Why of Jaypeg (and this post) 
 I thought building an image host would be fun, so I started making my own. This
blog series is intended to be a refined journal of my experience building that
image host, along with some code and thoughts that will hopefully help you on
your own software creation adventures. If you’re a “just show me the code”…
For those who are more keen towards going in guns blazing, here is the repo
link . 
 Now, onto the verbage. 
 My first (tiny) step towards making academic publishing
better 
is actually developing a good understanding for the tools I want to use. So, I
made my own hacked-together clone of
 ConnectedPapers , which takes a preprint from
arXiv and recommends similar…
Academic publishing is sometimes referred as a triple payer system because the
publisher is paid three times over the course of the product life cycle. First
by the governments who foot the majority of operating costs for a research
group, then by the institutions who pay the publisher for rights to submit a
manuscript, and then a third time by the readers who are paying for the…
During my undergrad I took a data science class. It was a great class
where we dove into topics such as EDA, lasso regression, SVMs,
visualizations, and many other good things that other people across the
Internet love to blog about ad nauseum. The one thing I had a terrible
experience with was R. Let me clarify—R is a fantastic environment for
statisticians to explore…
This is a blog post documenting an interesting data
structure I implemented a
couple years ago, which I'm now using as the backbone for a
path-finding library which you will be able to incorporate into your own
games. The system I implemented comes from this paper published a couple
years ago by Dr. Aizawa and Dr. Tanaka. As far as I can tell, there is
no open source…
A couple months ago I stumbled across this
paper 
and thought it was pretty cool. “Deep Q-Learning looks cool, let’s give
it a go.” I thought to myself. Then I remembered I don’t have a colossal
HPC cluster at my disposal to do things like make a DoTA 2 AI that goes
toe-to-toe with the pros and I
got sad. "Well, maybe I can offload the simulation of…
I’m a Machine Learning Engineer at SmarterDX , where
I help deploy and maintain LLM-powered pipelines in the healthcare admin space.
Previously, I was a member of the NUCAR Lab at Northeastern University, studying
under Prof. David Kaeli .
Before that, I got my B.Sc. in Computer Science at Clemson University and worked
under Prof. Rong Ge looking at
performance…
The following is a selection of projects I’ve worked on over the past few years
to give you an idea of my interests as an ML engineer and what sort of work I’m
passionate about. At the moment, I’m in search of full-time work as a
mid-career ML engineer where I would help build data-driven software alongside
other talented engineers. At the moment, I’m…