A conceptual overview with example Python code — This is the 5th article in a series on using Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice. In this post, we will discuss how to fine-tune (FT) a pre-trained LLM. We start by introducing key FT concepts and techniques, then finish with a concrete example of how to fine-tune a model…

The Realities of Freelancing in Data Science — My Search for Mentorship You can either learn from your experience or the experiences of others. The former is slow and painful, while the latter is (relatively) quick and easy. This is why having mentors can help accelerate progress toward your goals. While this all sounds great in principle, actually finding the right mentors…

An Introduction and Example — This is the final post in a 3-part series on Fourier and Wavelet Transforms. In previous posts both the Fourier Transform (FT) and its practical implementation, the Fast-Fourier Transform (FFT) are discussed. In this post, a similar idea is introduced the Wavelet Transform. Once you have a solid understanding of…

7 prompting tricks, LangChain, and Python example code — This is the fourth article in a series on using large language models (LLMs) in practice. Here, I will discuss prompt engineering (PE) and how to use it to build LLM-enabled applications. I start by reviewing key PE techniques and then walk through Python example code of using LangChain to…

A 10-year Retrospective — 10 years ago today, I got the worst (and best) birthday gift of my life. I dropped acid with my friends and spiraled into existential confusion and panic (colloquially known as a “bad trip”). …

A quick-start guide to using open-source LLMs — This is the 3rd article in a series on using large language models (LLMs) in practice. Here I will give a beginner-friendly guide to the Hugging Face Transformers library, which provides an easy and cost-free way to work with a wide variety of open-source language models. I will start by…

A complete beginner-friendly introduction with example code — This is the 2nd article in a series on using Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice. Here I present a beginner-friendly introduction to the OpenAI API. This allows you to go beyond restrictive chat interfaces like ChatGPT and to get more out of LLMs for your unique use cases. …

3 levels of using LLMs in practice — This is the first article in a series on using Large Language Models (LLMs) in practice. Here I will give an introduction to LLMs and present 3 levels of working with them. Future articles will explore practical aspects of LLMs, such as how to use OpenAI’s public API, the Hugging…

From resume to portfolio and beyond — While it might seem data science is all about programming and building fancy machine learning models, when it comes to getting hired as a data scientist, it's not just about what you know but also what you show. This was a theme in recent video and blog series where I…