Seeing My Coursework Everywhere: An AI Student’s Look at Web DevelopmentI have a friend who’s a frontend developer, and our conversations lately have been fascinating. I’ll be explaining a concept from my NLP class, like attention mechanisms or in-context learning, and he’ll stop me and say, “Wait, that’s exactly what’s behind this new tool I’m using.” It’s becoming clear that the world of web development is no longer separate from the world of AI; they’re actively merging, and it’s amazing t... Read article

From “Does It Work?” to “Will It Break?”: My Evolution in Software TestingIf I’m being honest, for the first couple of years of my computer science degree, “testing” meant running my code, seeing if it worked, and if it didn’t, throwing console.log statements everywhere until it did. It wasn’t until I was put on a team for a major project that I realized how unsustainable that was. A feature I added would break something my teammate wrote, and we’d spend hours trying to figure out why. This f... Read article

Grappling with LLM Evaluation: A Student’s Field NotesOne of the biggest shifts for me moving from traditional NLP tasks to working with large language models has been evaluation. In my earlier coursework, evaluating a model was often straightforward—calculate the F1-score, check the accuracy, and you had a pretty clear idea of how well you were doing. But with generative models, how do you grade an essay, a poem, or a snippet of code? It’s a question my peers and I debate constantly. The Old... Read article

From Monolith to Microservices: A Student’s Journey with Node.jsFor my final software architecture course, we had to build a small e-commerce application. Like most students, I started by building a “monolith.” All my code—user authentication, product catalog, and order processing—was in a single Node.js Express application, connected to a single database. It worked, and it was simple to get started. But then, the requirements started getting more complex. A change to the order processing log... Read article

Trying to Understand MoE: How LLMs Get Both Bigger and SmarterEvery few months, a new paper or model release sends a shockwave through the NLP community. Recently, it was all about models with “trillions of parameters.” My first reaction was, “How is that even possible?” The computational cost to run a dense model of that size would be astronomical. The answer, as I learned after a deep dive with my reading group, lies in a clever architecture called Mixture of Experts (MoE). The “Committee o... Read article

Leveling Up in React: My Journey with Advanced HooksFor the first few months of learning React, I lived in a comfortable world defined by two hooks: useState and useEffect. They were my hammer and screwdriver, and I used them for everything. But as the application for my capstone project grew, I started hitting walls. My state logic became a tangled mess, components were re-rendering for no reason, and I was repeating the same patterns over and over. This forced me to venture beyond the basic... Read article

Building My First RAG System: Grounding LLMs in RealityOne of the first things you learn about large language models is their “knowledge cutoff.” Ask a model about an event that happened yesterday, and it will politely tell you it doesn’t have access to real-time information. For a project last semester, we were tasked with building a Q&A bot about recent developments in our field, and this limitation was a huge roadblock. That’s when our professor introduced us to Retrieval-Augmented Gen... Read article

My TypeScript ‘Aha!’ Moments: Best Practices I Learned on a Real ProjectI just spent a semester wrestling with a pretty complex web application for my software engineering course. We chose TypeScript from the start, thinking it would magically prevent all bugs. It didn’t. But what it did do was force us to be better engineers. Along the way, I had a few “aha!” moments—things that, once they clicked, completely changed how I write code. Here are the big ones. Lesson 1: Your tsconfig.json is Yo... Read article

My App Was Working, But It Was Slow: A Student’s Guide to Web PerformanceI finally deployed the first version of my portfolio project. All the features worked, the code was (mostly) clean, and I was proud of it. I sent the link to a few friends, and the first piece of feedback I got wasn’t about the features—it was, “Whoa, this takes a while to load.” It was a classic student developer mistake. I had focused so much on making it work that I never stopped to think about making it fast. This se... Read article