#fundamentals
10 posts
Foundational posts — the explanations I wish I had when I was learning these topics myself.
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The Crypto Module: Hashing, Encryption, and What to Use When
A practical guide to cryptography primitives available in every language — hashing, salting, HMAC, AES encryption, and secure random. Know what to use when.
securitygolangjavascriptfundamentals -
Vectors and Matrices: The Language Neural Networks Speak
A ground-up introduction to vectors, matrices, dot products, and matrix multiplication — the operations every neural network is built from.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
Derivatives and Gradients: Teaching Machines to Improve
Derivatives, the chain rule, partial derivatives, the gradient, and gradient descent — the calculus that drives every step of neural network learning.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
Probability and the Gaussian: How Neural Networks Express Uncertainty
Probability distributions, the Gaussian, softmax, and cross-entropy loss — the tools neural networks use to express uncertainty and produce predictions.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
A Neural Network from Scratch: Perceptrons, Layers, and Forward Pass
Build a neural network layer by layer — the perceptron, activation functions (ReLU, sigmoid, tanh), and a complete worked forward pass.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
Backpropagation: How Neural Networks Learn from Mistakes
A complete walkthrough of backpropagation — the chain rule applied to computation graphs. Includes a worked numerical example through a 2-layer network.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
Embeddings and Similarity: Turning Words into Vectors
How neural networks represent words as dense vectors, why dot products measure similarity, and how cosine similarity finds related concepts.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
The Attention Mechanism: How Transformers Focus
A detailed walkthrough of scaled dot-product attention — Query, Key, and Value matrices, the softmax operation, and a complete numerical example.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
The Transformer and GPT: Putting It All Together
Multi-head attention, positional encoding, layer normalisation, and the feed-forward sublayer. A complete step-by-step forward pass through GPT.
mathematicsmachine-learningfundamentals -
Database Normalization: 1NF through 5NF Explained
A practical guide to database normalization — 1NF through 5NF, when to denormalize, and the pitfalls teams hit. With concrete data examples.
databasesqlfundamentals