Shawn NgDeep dives into the hidden CS around you.
Long-form breakdowns of the algorithms and systems everyone uses and nobody looks at, from the math to working code.
What Is Jev? TypeSafe AI's System One Model, and Why It Refuses to Talk
Jev is TypeSafe AI's System One model: a non-autoregressive transformer that returns typed, calibrated decisions instead of text. How it differs from LLMs.
What A MEAN Stack Developer Actually Is (And What I'd Tell You Seven Years Later)
MongoDB, Express, Angular, Node: what each layer does, what the job looks like day to day, and an honest reassessment of one-language-everywhere in 2026.
Recommendation Is Vector Search With a Query You Never Typed
Search and recommendation run the same engine: encode a query as a vector, return the nearest items. Only the query's origin differs. Here is the geometry.
The State of AI: A Field Report From Someone Who Actually Ships This Stuff
A working engineer's mid-2026 field report on AI: what changed, what plateaued, where production reality is messy, and where the real work moved.
Local Models vs Frontier APIs: An Honest Accounting
What it actually takes to run LLMs on your own hardware, why memory bandwidth is the real bottleneck, and when the economics flip in favor of the API.
The Solvers Refuse to Die: Classical Optimization vs the Learned Upstarts
An honest scoreboard of classical optimization solvers versus learning-to-optimize, and the hybrid pattern where ML proposes and exact methods verify.
How Machines Learned to See
Computer vision's full arc: hand-crafted features, the 2012 ImageNet moment, ResNet, vision transformers, CLIP, and what models still cannot see.
The 1947 Algorithm That Routes Every Package You've Ever Received
How linear programming and Dantzig's simplex method work, why they still schedule airlines and route packages, with Python code and interior point methods.
How YouTube Decides What You Watch
How YouTube's recommendation system works: two-stage retrieval and ranking, watch-time prediction, and multi-task MMoE models, per the published research.
The Math Problem That Protects The Entire Internet Is Dying
RSA and elliptic-curve cryptography secure the internet, and Shor's algorithm on a large quantum computer breaks both. How it works and what replaces it.
The Rejected Algorithm That Helped Land Us on the Moon
How the Kalman filter works, from the predict-update math to Python code, and how a once-rejected algorithm guided Apollo and now runs in every GPS.
The Scary Truth About Your Phone's SIM Card
Your SIM card is a computer with a CPU, OS, and network stack, running carrier applets you cannot audit. Inside the SIM, Simjacker, and what you can do.
The Bug That Killed the Lights for 50 Million People
How a race condition in power grid software helped cause the 2003 Northeast blackout, which cut power to an estimated 50 million people.
A* Pathfinding Explained: Why It Beats Dijkstra
Learn how the A* pathfinding algorithm works, why it outperforms Dijkstra, and see a Python implementation with heuristic functions.
Bellman-Ford Algorithm: How Traders Find Free Money with Graph Theory
How the Bellman-Ford algorithm detects negative cycles in graphs and enables currency arbitrage for finding risk-free profit.
Quantum Computers Have a Dirty Secret
Five fundamental limitations of quantum computing that explain why your laptop still beats quantum computers for most real-world tasks.
4 Data Structures Every Developer Should Master
The four data structures every developer needs: arrays, hash tables, stacks and queues, and trees, with Python examples and Big-O analysis.
Why Cache Misses Are the Real Performance Killer
Understand how CPU cache misses destroy performance and learn cache-friendly coding patterns that can deliver up to 100x speed improvements.
The Hidden Magic of Hash Tables: How Your Computer Finds Anything in an Instant
How hash tables achieve O(1) lookups: hash functions, collision resolution, load factor, and a Python implementation built from scratch.
The Hidden Algorithm That Runs Your Life: Dijkstra's Algorithm Explained
Learn how Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm works, powers Google Maps and internet routing, and where it breaks down, with a Python implementation.