Blog

Two kinds of writing: deep-dives into my Kaggle competition solutions, and notes on the ideas I break down while learning in public.

Kaggle Solutions

In-depth write-ups of my competition approaches — the architecture, what actually worked, and honest post-mortems.

Beating 24% on ARC-AGI-2: A Hybrid Symbolic + Neural Solver, Honestly

A three-engine hybrid solver for the ARC Prize 2026 (ARC-AGI-2) — and an honest look at why symbolic search scores exactly zero on the benchmark built to defeat it.

ARC Prize 2025: Solving Puzzles With No Pretraining

A per-puzzle CompressARC solver that trains a tiny network from scratch on each puzzle at test time — plus the systems engineering to pack thousands of steps into Kaggle's 12-hour limit.

Orbit Wars: How Adopting Someone Else's Bot Beat My Own

A candid RTS write-up: how the live ladder kept demolishing my self-play "improvements", and why adopting a stronger base agent was the real win.

Charting Student Math Misunderstandings with DeBERTa

Turning a student's written math explanation into a top-3 misconception prediction with DeBERTa-v3 — LB 0.925 / CV 0.930+ and a multi-model ensemble (105-upvote starter).

Finding Data in the Footnotes: LLMs + Constrained Decoding

From regex + random forests to a Qwen-32B pipeline that extracts dataset DOIs from papers and forces a Primary/Secondary call with logits-processor-zoo.

Notes & Tutorials

Concepts I’ve broken down while learning — infrastructure, MLOps, and ML fundamentals.

Docker Images, Layers & Registries — Explained Simply

A beginner-friendly walk through layers, checksums, manifests, registries, and why they beat dumping tarballs in S3.

Building RAG from Scratch

Let’s build a RAG pipeline from scratch using Llama 3 and DeepSeek-R1.

MLflow

A step-by-step guide to using MLflow for managing ML experiments and deployments.

KFold

Let’s understand how to use KFold cross-validation.

Understanding Large Language Models (LLMs)

A deep dive into the world of Large Language Models, their architecture, and real-world applications.