Data science as engineering, not a science project
Data science still gets treated as an academic exercise. Engineering constraints, caching, timeouts and safe fallbacks are what turn a model into something you can actually run on a client site.
Category: Development
Filter Pandas DataFrames: cleaner ways than boolean masks
Nested boolean masks are hard to read and harder to debug. Cleaner ways to filter Pandas DataFrames with .query(), .isin(), .between() and the .str accessor.
Vector search optimization: flatten your JSON before embedding
Raw JSON in an embedding model spends your token budget on braces and quotes. Flattening product data into plain sentences gives the model the kind of text it was trained to read.
ML in production: what shipping a model actually takes
A notebook demo is not production. This is what sits between the two: an API contract, a container, infrastructure that suits the workload, and monitoring that catches drift before the predictions quietly go bad.
WordPress Studio CLI 1.7.0 brings real local dev automation
WordPress Studio 1.7.0 ships a CLI that can create, start, stop and delete local sites, and run WP-CLI inside the Studio environment. What the studio site and studio wp commands do, plus how to let a coding agent use them without losing a site.
How convolutional neural networks learn musical similarity
Metadata filters only take music discovery so far. How CNNs read audio as Mel-spectrograms, how contrastive learning with InfoNCE loss shapes the embeddings, and why the inference belongs outside WordPress.
Modeling urban walking risk with H3 hexagons and XGBoost
Fastest-route logic says nothing about what a walk is actually like. How the StreetSense project models urban walking risk with Uber’s H3 indexing, sine and cosine time encoding, and XGBoost under a Tweedie objective.
CSS stacking context: why your z-index does nothing
z-index is not a global ranking. It only orders elements inside whatever stacking context they sit in. The folder analogy, the CSS properties that quietly create a new context, and how isolation: isolate frees a trapped modal.
Layered architecture in WordPress: get logic out of functions.php
Fourteen years of WordPress work, one recurring problem: everything ends up in functions.php. Here are the five layers I use to separate hooks, workflows, business rules, database access and outside services, plus a before-and-after AJAX handler.
Distributed training data transfer: fixing the multi-GPU stall
Multi-GPU training usually stalls on communication, not compute. What nvidia-smi topo and Nsight show you about NCCL overhead, and the DDP settings I change: static graph, bucket views, PowerSGD compression and smaller buckets.