Imad Dabbura
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Deep Learning
(9)
ML Systems
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Machine Learning
(6)
NLP
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Blog
Deep science. Built from scratch. Shared openly.
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Make ML Systems Ship Again
A practitioner’s guide to finding and fixing the one bottleneck that governs your system’s performance.
ML Systems
Sep 21, 2025
22 min
evergreen
Hard-Learned Lessons in Shipping Software (AI/ML) Projects
A Guide for Engineers and Product Managers
Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Software Engineering
Jan 5, 2025
11 min
growing
From Forgetting to Fluency: How to Learn Smarter, Not Harder
Evidence-based tips from cognitive science to transform the way you absorb, retain, and apply knowledge in any field.
Problem Solving
Sep 13, 2024
7 min
growing
Why Your Final Layer Shouldn’t Have Softmax
The log-sum-exp trick, numerical instability, and when raw logits are the right choice
Deep Learning
Jun 9, 2024
8 min
evergreen
Cutting the Fat: A Practical Guide to Neural Network Pruning
From weight sparsity to hardware-aware strategies—learn how to shrink deep learning models without shrinking their performance
Deep Learning
May 3, 2024
4 min
Building GPT(2/3) from Scratch: Turning Theory into a Working Transformer
A hands-on journey through implementing the 124M GPT architecture in PyTorch—complete with attention mechanisms, optimizations, and the lessons learned along the way
NLP
Apr 10, 2024
5 min
evergreen
Byte Pair Encoding from Scratch
Building a BPE tokenizer step by step — the algorithm that decides how language models see text
NLP
Apr 10, 2024
10 min
evergreen
The RAG Optimization Playbook
Proven tactics, pitfalls, and fine-tuning methods to build faster, smarter, and more accurate retrieval-augmented generation systems
NLP
Mar 5, 2024
4 min
evergreen
Inside Python’s Modules and Packages: The Machinery Behind import
Explore the inner workings of Python’s import system, including path resolution, package types, importlib internals, and advanced import hacks
Software Engineering
Feb 9, 2024
20 min
growing
Automatic Differentiation Demystified
From dual numbers to backpropagation — the intuition, the trade-offs, and what breaks in practice for LLM training
ML Systems
Feb 3, 2024
9 min
evergreen
Git from the Inside Out
An intuition-first, reference-grade guide to Git’s object model, branching mechanics, history rewriting, and the professional workflows that tie it all together
Software Engineering
Dec 22, 2023
53 min
evergreen
I Built My Own PyTorch (Tiny Version) — Here’s Everything I Learned
Inside the engineering decisions, optimizations, and trade-offs behind a homegrown deep learning framework
ML Systems
Dec 20, 2023
29 min
evergreen
Breaking Text Apart (The Smart Way)
From single characters to advanced subword splits — see how modern tokenizers like WordPiece and SentencePiece prepare language for AI.
NLP
Jan 14, 2023
12 min
evergreen
C Program Startup
Does C program really start at
main
?
Software Engineering
Oct 21, 2022
6 min
growing
The Transformer Architecture: A Deep Dive
An intuition-first, reference-grade breakdown of every building block—from why attention was invented to how encoder, decoder, and encoder-decoder architectures work
NLP
Feb 14, 2022
55 min
evergreen
Inside LSTMs: Implementing and Optimizing Sequential Models from First Principles
A deep dive into LSTM internals—covering the math, gates, performance considerations, and a full PyTorch-aligned implementation from scratch.
NLP
Mar 10, 2020
15 min
evergreen
Anomaly Detection
Machine Learning
Sep 11, 2019
6 min
growing
Gradient Descent Algorithm and Its Variants
Deep dive into gradient descent algorithm: Batch vs. Mini-batch vs. Stochastic.
Deep Learning
Feb 18, 2019
10 min
evergreen
Conda Essentials
Enough background about Conda to be productive!
Software Engineering
Feb 18, 2019
5 min
growing
K-means Clustering: Algorithm, Applications, Evaluation Methods, and Drawbacks
Deep dive into K-means algorithm to find subgroups within data.
Machine Learning
Sep 11, 2018
15 min
growing
Coding Neural Network Part 5 - Dropout
What is Dropout, its use, and how to implement it?
Deep Learning
May 20, 2018
4 min
evergreen
Coding Neural Network Part 4 - Regularization
What is regularization and how it helps NN generalizes better?
Deep Learning
May 8, 2018
9 min
evergreen
Coding Neural Network Part 3 - Parameters’ Initialization
The role of parameter initialization in training and different ways to initialize parameters.
Deep Learning
Apr 20, 2018
5 min
evergreen
Coding Neural Network Part 2 - Gradient Checking
How to check numerically if the implementation of backward propagation is correct?
Deep Learning
Apr 8, 2018
4 min
evergreen
Coding Neural Network Part 1 - Forward & Backward Propagation
What it takes to go from input to output? And how to compute the gradients?
Deep Learning
Apr 1, 2018
11 min
evergreen
Bandit Algorithms: epsilon-Greedy Algorithm
What is epsilon-Greedy Algorithm and how to use it in A/B testing?
Machine Learning
Mar 31, 2018
9 min
growing
Predicting Loan Repayment
Trying different modeling techniques to deal with imbalanced data, missing values, and ensemble models.
Machine Learning
Mar 15, 2018
17 min
growing
Character-Level Language Model
How an RNN learns to generate names one character at a time — and what it teaches us about language models
NLP
Feb 22, 2018
19 min
evergreen
Predicting Employee Turnover
Experimenting with different models on employee turnover data.
Machine Learning
Dec 11, 2017
9 min
growing
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