Work
Recruiting Stuff
I did 2 leetcode problems. I’m currently at a total of 62 for this summer. These are the ones I did.
Longest Palindromic Substring - This one had a really simple intuitive solution that was O(n^2), but I would challenge you to try out the DP solution :D
Course Schedule - This was my favorite problem of the week, lots of thinking went into it. My hint for it is: what states can the nodes exist in?
As you can probably tell. Recruiting hasn't really been on my mind as much as it should be. I put in two job apps before I wrote this though!
Building
This week was an adventure. So many things went very well and some things are still completely broken.
Let me start off with my successes.
My baml implementation was fire. What is baml you may ask. Well that just stands for BoundaryML. It’s a YC startup founded by this guy: Vaibhav. Essentially its a python package that provides a consistent way to structure the output of LLMs into a useful JSON format.
So basically you get an LLM Body of text and define schema for what you want → The BAML package iterates on it and quickly adjusts it to your format of choice → And boom, you have a useful json object of data.
I actually liked the package so much I straight up just messaged the CEO, and now I get to talk to him this upcoming Tuesday.
Now for my problems with this week. And boy are there many.
Let’s start off with my largest one. Dulany.ai frontend is hosted on Vercel. Vercel’s server-side API calls time out within 15 seconds. Lots of my backend code takes more than 15 seconds to return responses. This is a huge issue for me, because this causes the client to essentially time out and error.
I learned how to go about fixing this at work actually. I asked my manager at Capital One about how I should go about architecting a fix for this problem. He basically just laughed at me and told me that the solution to this problem has existed for a long time. It’s called Long Polling. My friend Varun also explained this exact concept to me without knowing what the specific terminology was. ( Shoutout to my manager and Varun for helping me through this).
So this is how we implement one time requests in dulany.ai.
Client makes a request
Backend returns unique task-id for process modifying some form of persistent storage
The data is stored like this (imagine it as a hash map) → task-id : data location
We will be storing our data in AWS S3 Buckets :D
Client polls data source until and update is received, if data does not update / appear within certain time frame error out
polling example in typescript Boom! We don’t have to worry about the speed of your backend.
Other than that we have mainly just been writing hella code. I was particularly proud of this little frontend gimmick I made on the 4th. I enjoy being a css monkey sometimes.
We also set up our Calendly and had some more product / business level meetings to make sure we are well positioned by EOW (next Saturday) to start invoicing for revenue and pump more features. We have some big infra changes incoming soon…
MScribe
On the MScribe side of things, AJ and Qayf were able to get my RAG implementation running locally which I was really happy about. I have been trying to teach them the ‘why’ on how virtual environments work, best practices behind git, etc., so that they can grow quickly once we ramp up on writing code. I am very bullish on those two.
Also we made it out of dependency hell, which I was really happy about. Protobuf was giving me anger issues.
Physical Training
Monday - July 29th, Lower Body Strength Training
Tuesday - July 30th, 3 Mile Run + Upper Body Strength Training + Rock Climbing
Wednesday - July 31st, Pull Workout
Thursday - August 1st, 2 Mile Run (8:44 Pace)
Friday - August 2nd, Pull Workout
Saturday - August 3rd, Skipped for Lolla
Sunday - August 4th, Push Workout + 2.5 Mile Run
Education
I learned mostly about software infrastructure this week and how to fake demos to execs to get them to validate your idea. I also learned how to work with the Node-AWS sdk at work which was pretty interesting.
Idea validation was huge for me this week. But yeah, I didn’t really read much or anything this week. Just spent lots of time living life and building.
I also watched a sweet video on the financial modeling of night clubs → How night clubs actually work.
Fun
I went to Lollapalooza. I discovered I really mess with EDM style music and more of a chiller vibe. Also went to a couple of restaurants which was fun.
Insights from this week
If you can’t teach a topic to someone else, you don’t actually understand it.
When I learned how to setup the Koa framework at work, I ended up mentoring one of the contract engineers I really learned the intricacies of why what I did worked; to truly understand something, you have to be able to teach it perfectly.
Bet on smart people.
We all have limited time to spend with others. So pick wisely who you spend your time with. I have been trying to reach out to people I think are cool by sending them dm’s and cold emailing. Networking is key for maximizing the value of your time.
Entertainment isn’t about the medium. It’s about the people.
The reason people go to basketball games is not for the game. The reason people go to music festival isn’t for the music. It for the feeling of unity behind a feeling. So if you are an entertainer… your goal is to make people feel unified, and not alone.
whens M Scribe launch?