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20 years of YC

https://vickiboykis.com/2025/03/17/20-years-of-yc/

Published: March 17, 2025 00:00

I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was…

You can just hack on ATProto

https://vickiboykis.com/2025/01/23/you-can-just-hack-on-atproto/

Published: January 23, 2025 00:00

Icon by iconixar Since I signed up for Bluesky last year, I’ve been wanting to make something using the AT Protocol that the platform is built on top of. I finally had a chance to do it over the holiday break and built GitFeed, a small Go app that filters…

How FastAPI path operations work

https://vickiboykis.com/2025/01/14/how-fastapi-path-operations-work/

Published: January 14, 2025 00:00

If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI. There are a lot of features that make FastAPI easy to get started with. There are also a lot of nuances that take a while to understand. One feature I’ve been…

Everything I did in 2024

https://vickiboykis.com/2025/01/03/everything-i-did-in-2024/

Published: January 3, 2025 00:00

I want to get back into writing more regularly this year, so in light of that, here’s my last year in review. Evaluating LLMs Like many of us in tech, I spent a large portion of 2024 thinking about and working with LLMs, but I was lucky enough to do it for…

Favorite Books of 2024

https://vickiboykis.com/essays/2024-12-31-favorite-books/

Published: January 1, 2025 00:00

Favorite books of 2024 Like last year, I spent a fair amount of the year reading code and technical books. Every year I have this struggle. There is a lot going on in machine learning and engineering and I need to stay on top of it. Yet, I also need to…

Write code with your Alphabet Radio on

https://vickiboykis.com/2024/12/16/write-code-with-your-alphabet-radio-on/

Published: December 16, 2024 00:00

There is a lot of debate in the software community around whether LLMs can replace developers. Part of the reason is the way we formulate the problem of what it means to write software. In industry, we still give outsize cultural deference to software…

Why are we using LLMs as calculators?

https://vickiboykis.com/2024/11/09/why-are-we-using-llms-as-calculators/

Published: November 9, 2024 00:00

We keep trying to get LLMs to do math. We want them to count the number of “rs” in strawberry, to perform algebraic reasoning, do multiplication, and to solve math theorems. A recent experiment particularly piqued my interest. Researchers used OpenAI’s new…

Dead Internet Souls

https://vickiboykis.com/2024/09/19/dead-internet-souls/

Published: September 19, 2024 00:00

In the 1800s, before serfdom was abolished in the Russian empire, landowners paid taxes based on how many serfs they had. A census was conducted every few years by government employees traveling across the empire and doing counts; a manual map-reduce of…

Don't worry about LLMs

https://vickiboykis.com/2024/05/20/dont-worry-about-llms/

Published: May 20, 2024 00:00

This is a transcript of the talk I gave at PyCon Italia 2024 in May in Florence. Introduction Buongiorno PyconIt, grazie per avermi invitata a parlare! Avrei voluta fare tutto il discorso in italiano, ma lo sto ancora imparando. Per adesso posso parlare…

We've been put in the vibe space

https://vickiboykis.com/2024/05/06/weve-been-put-in-the-vibe-space/

Published: May 6, 2024 00:00

Jakob’s Law of UX goes something like this. I, as a user online, spend my time on many sites. As such, when I come to your site, I am already used to the way the other sites work, and I don’t want to learn new paradigms. Some also call these preconceived…