How I Shrank My LLM: A Student’s Dive into Model QuantizationOne of the most exciting and frustrating moments in my Master’s program was when I finally got my hands on a powerful, pre-trained language model. The excitement came from its incredible capabilities; the frustration came when I realized it was too big to run on my university-provided GPU for any serious fine-tuning. This sent me down the rabbit hole of model compression, and my first major stop was quantization. What Exactly is Qua... Read article

A Grad Student’s Guide to Fine-Tuning LLMs: From Brute Force to FinesseWhen I was assigned my first big research project, the goal was to adapt a general-purpose large language model for a very specific task: analyzing sentiment in financial news. My first thought was, “Easy, I’ll just fine-tune it.” I quickly learned that “just fine-tuning” is a massive oversimplification. The journey taught me a ton about the different strategies we have at our disposal. The Default: Full-Parameter Fine-Tun... Read article

How I Finally Conquered CSS Layout: A Student’s Guide to Flexbox & GridFor the longest time, CSS layout felt like a dark art to me. My early attempts at building websites involved a chaotic mix of float, clear, and position: absolute. I spent more time fighting with my own CSS than actually building features. Centering a div felt like a monumental achievement. Then, in my web development course, we were properly introduced to Flexbox and Grid. It was a revelation. It was like someone hand... Read article

On Data Contamination in LLMs: A Grad Student’s PerspectiveIn my NLP seminar last semester, a recurring theme was the integrity of our evaluation benchmarks. We spent weeks discussing how to measure progress, but one topic that really stuck with me was data contamination—the subtle, almost accidental way we can end up “cheating” on our tests. It’s a problem that seems technical on the surface but cuts to the very core of our field’s credibility. The Core of the Problem: When Test Data Becomes... Read article

Navigating the Framework Maze: A Student’s Take on React, Vue, and AngularFor one of my CS courses this semester, we have to build a dynamic web application to showcase our final project. That means I’ve been thrown headfirst into one of the most daunting decisions a student developer has to make: choosing a JavaScript framework. The internet is full of strong opinions, and it feels like picking a side in a war. After weeks of tutorials and reading, here’s my attempt to make sense of the big ... Read article

Finding My Footing in Heidelberg: How Hiking Saved My SanityWhen I first arrived in Heidelberg for my Master’s program, I was completely overwhelmed. The classes were demanding, the language was a barrier, and I felt a bit lost in the picture-perfect streets of the Altstadt. My world felt like it had shrunk to the size of my desk and the university library. Then, one Saturday, on a whim, I decided to hike up the famous Philosophers’ Way. That short walk changed everything. It was the beginnin... Read article

Making Sense of Multimodality: How Models See and ReadFor the longest time in my NLP studies, the world was made of text. Then came the rise of multimodal AI, and suddenly models could see, hear, and read all at once. For my seminar on advanced models, I had to do a deep dive into how exactly you get a model to understand both an image and a sentence at the same time. It turns out there are a few competing philosophies, each with its own flavor. The First Big Question: When Do We Mix the Ingr... Read article

Packing Up Heidelberg: More Than Just a Year AbroadMy apartment is full of boxes, and my flight home is in a few days. As I try to fit a year of my life into two suitcases, I keep getting distracted by the memories. I came to Heidelberg for a Master’s degree, expecting a year of tough classes, late nights in the library, and maybe a bit of sightseeing on the weekends. I got all of that, but I also got something I didn’t expect: a complete rewiring of who I am. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact ... Read article

Choosing a Look and Feel: My Dive into Material, Fluent, and UI5For a course on Human-Computer Interaction, we were tasked with building a prototype for a new application. A big part of our grade was the user interface and overall user experience. This meant I had to move beyond default HTML buttons and choose a real design system and component library. I quickly fell down the rabbit hole of design philosophies and ended up comparing three of the biggest players: Google’s Material Design, Mic... Read article