I like writing about things I'm actually building — real numbers from real projects, honest about what worked and what didn't. Each collection is a long-running series on one project. New ones show up as I start working on new things.
Building a search engine from scratch in Rust, chapter by chapter through Manning's Introduction to Information Retrieval. Inverted index, phrase search, spell correction, compression, TF-IDF ranking. Currently on Chapter 7 — efficient scoring at scale.
A semantic movie search engine. The first attempt failed — I was throwing LLMs at retrieval without understanding retrieval. The second attempt worked: BM25 from scratch with multi-zone ranking. A startup founder used it to find a Japanese animated film he couldn't find anywhere else.