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The Polymathic Engineer
Newsletter by Franco Fernando
A newsletter about Algorithms, Computer Vision, and Distributed Systems
13 posts in the last 90 days · newest 2 Oct
You can refactor everything except your API
Coupling, not naming. First article on API design.
10 min read
Latency: What It Is and What Limits It (Part II)
Where delays hide in the stack, how they add up, and how to measure them.
Paid
Latency Is Not a Single Number
What latency really is. The physics and math that bound it, and why the average always lies.
Paid
Exception Handling in Practice
Patterns and anti-patterns for signaling, catching, and surviving failures in your code.
Paid
Logistic Regression
How a classification model learns to predict probabilities instead of flat yes/no answers.
Paid
Disjoint Sets: From Linear to Almost Constant Time
Tracking which items belong to the same group looks trivial, until your inputs get big.
Paid
IP Addressing, Part III: Inside the IP Packet
What actually travels on the wire: the IPv4 header, fragmentation, and what IPv6 changed.
9 min read
IP Addressing, Part II: Scaling IPv4 Across the Internet
How classful addressing gave way to CIDR, and how private addresses and NAT kept the world from running out of IPv4.
Paid
The Anatomy of an IPv4 Address (Part I)
How an IPv4 address is built, what a subnet mask does, and how a device determines the network it belongs to.
Paid
The Perceptron
How the simplest classification model works, and why it is the building block of every neural network.
Paid
How the Operating System Runs Many Tasks on One CPU
Multitasking, context switching, and the scheduler that makes it all work.
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The Training Trap: Underfitting, Overfitting, and How to Escape Them
A practical guide to the most common problems in machine learning training and the techniques to solve them.
Paid
Service Mesh vs API Gateway (Part III)
Two patterns that look similar, solve different problems, and work best together.
Paid
The Depth-First Search Pattern: Exploring Trees and Graphs
How to systematically search through all paths by going as deep as possible before backtracking
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Service Mesh: Why and How It Works (Part I)
How a dedicated infrastructure layer can take over the job of managing service-to-service communication.
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The Divide and Conquer: Breaking Problems into Smaller Pieces
How to split a problem into independent subproblems, solve each one, and combine the results
Paid