web dev ➜ systems engineering journey

I'm live coding myself learning Rust and building increasingly difficult projects to get better at systems engineering.

Some relevant repositories (ordered by latest):

• ⛏️ Nylium - custom Minecraft server implementation in Rust (WIP)
• 🖼️ qoi.rs - image compression codec in Rust
• 🦀 Learn Rust - my notes when going through the Rust book and rustlings exercises

Projects

• 🪏 OpenVortex (WIP) - Local network tunnel for cross-platform developers
• 🕰️ Timestream - Local-first Git client, TVA-styled, with GitHub integration.
• ♾️ Momentum - Local-first progress tracker that tracks overall progress. No streaks. No guilt.

Experiments

• PianoMIDI - Synthesia-styled virtual MIDI piano
  • Video Showcase: Me playing Weeping Willow by Scott Joplin
  • Video Showcase: Me playing The Chrysanthemum by Scott Joplin
• Shapes + Mineflayer Minecraft AI Companion - LLM-to-Minecraft API connector & agent control via tool use
  • X Post / Video Showcase: AI follows instructions and collects resources
  • X Post / Image Showcase: Custom logging & comparing tool use in different models

Ideas

• License key management system for SaaS builders

Fun Stuff

• A pirate themed song I made at 4 am

Resources I'm Collecting

• Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces - good OS book
• Beej's Guide to Network Programming - good network programming book
• DeepML - practice implementing machine learning from scratch

ML papers to implement (thanks PaperCode)

Year	Paper	Description
1980	Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs)	Implementing core RNN components from scratch: RNN cells, forward/backward passes, BPTT, initialization, padding utilities, gradient clipping, embeddings, full RNN blocks
1995	Support Vector Machines	Margin-based learning algorithm for classification, implementing the soft-margin SVM formulation and kernel tricks for non-linear decision boundaries
1997	Long Short-Term Memory Networks	Implement core LSTM components from scratch: LSTM cells with gates, forward/backward passes, BPTT, initialization, dropout masks, packed sequences, bidirectional LSTMs, full LSTM blocks
2001	Random Forests	Ensemble learning method using decision trees for classification and regression, with bagging and random feature selection
2012	ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks	The AlexNet paper that revolutionized computer vision with deep CNNs. Implementing core CNN components from scratch: convolution, ReLU activation, max pooling, local response normalization, etc
2013	Word2Vec	Efficient distributed representations of words using shallow neural networks, introducing skip-gram and CBOW models
2013	Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes	Introduces the variational autoencoder (VAE), a deep generative model that learns a latent variable space using the reparameterization trick
2014	Generative Adversarial Networks	Framework for estimating generative models via an adversarial process
2015	Human-level Control through Deep Reinforcement Learning	Deep Q-Network (DQN) combining Q-learning with deep neural networks for end-to-end learning of action values from raw pixels
2017	Attention is All You Need	Transformer model architecture, replacing RNNs and CNNs with self-attention mechanisms
2018	World Models	Generative RNN that learns spatial and temporal representations of a reinforcement learning environment
2018	BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding	Bidirectional encoder representation from transformers, uses masked language modeling and next sentence prediction for pre-training
2020	Vision Transformer (ViT)	An image is worth 16x16 words: transformers for image recognition at scale — applying transformers directly to image patches for vision tasks
2021	LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models	Efficient fine-tuning of large models using low-rank decomposition of weight updates
2022	OWL-ViT: Open-Vocabulary Object Detection using Vision Transformers	Open-vocab object detection using vision transformers with text prompts
2022	Matryoshka Representation Learning	Learning a single embedding space with nested sub-embeddings that support multiple effective representation dimensions, enabling adaptive computation without retraining
2025	Less is More: Recursive Reasoning with Tiny Networks	Recursive reasoning with tiny networks, focusing on latent state updates and answer refinement

🪦 Project Graveyard 💀

- **Circadia** (WIP) - Google calendar client that maps events to your natural circadian rhythm

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I just need to lock in