Resources
Tools I use, and blogs, videos, and courses I keep coming back to, each with a note on why.
Tools
- Claude CodeAnthropic · anthropic.com
Agentic coding in the terminal. This site was built with it.
- TanStack StartTanStack · tanstack.com
Type-safe React framework with SSR and server routes. Powers this site.
- OpenRouteropenrouter.ai
One API for many LLM providers, so swapping models is a config change, not a rewrite. Backs the chatbot here.
- uvAstral · docs.astral.sh
Python package and project manager that replaces pip, venv, and pyenv, and is fast enough that you stop noticing installs.
- RuffAstral · docs.astral.sh
Linter and formatter for Python in one binary. Replaces flake8, isort, and black.
- Hugging Face Hubhuggingface.co
Default place to find pretrained models and datasets before training anything from scratch.
- QGISqgis.org
Free desktop GIS. The quickest way to eyeball rasters and vector labels before they go into a model.
- Google Earth EngineGoogle · earthengine.google.com
Petabytes of satellite imagery with compute next to it. Good for building remote-sensing datasets without downloading scenes.
- Excalidrawexcalidraw.com
Hand-drawn style whiteboard for sketching architecture diagrams fast.
Blogs
- Building Effective AgentsAnthropic · anthropic.com
The clearest guide on when to use a simple workflow and when an agent actually earns its complexity.
- Lil’LogLilian Weng · lilianweng.github.io
Deep, well-cited surveys on LLM agents, prompting, and hallucination. Read before a new topic.
- Simon Willison’s WeblogSimon Willison · simonwillison.net
Daily, hands-on notes on new LLM releases and tools. The fastest way to keep up without the hype.
- eugeneyan.comEugene Yan · eugeneyan.com
Applied ML and LLM system patterns from production: evals, RecSys, and guardrails.
- Chip Huyen’s blogChip Huyen · huyenchip.com
ML engineering and MLOps from someone who wrote the book on it.
- The Illustrated TransformerJay Alammar · jalammar.github.io
The visual explanation of attention to send anyone starting with transformers.
Videos
- Neural Networks: Zero to HeroAndrej Karpathy · karpathy.ai
Builds backprop, then a GPT, from scratch in code. The best way to really understand what training does.
- Neural Networks series3Blue1Brown · 3blue1brown.com
Visual intuition for gradient descent, backprop, and attention. Pairs well with the Karpathy series.
Courses
- Practical Deep Learning for Codersfast.ai · course.fast.ai
Top-down and code-first: you train working models in lesson one, then learn why they work.
- LLM CourseHugging Face · huggingface.co
Free, hands-on course on transformers, fine-tuning, and the Hugging Face stack.
- Short CoursesDeepLearning.AI · deeplearning.ai
One-hour courses on specific GenAI topics (RAG, agents, evals). Good for filling one gap quickly.
Papers
- Attention Is All You NeedVaswani et al., 2017 · arxiv.org
The transformer paper. Short enough to read in one sitting.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP TasksLewis et al., 2020 · arxiv.org
Where the term RAG comes from. Useful context before building any retrieval system.
- ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language ModelsYao et al., 2022 · arxiv.org
The reason-then-act loop that most tool-using agents still follow.
- Segment AnythingKirillov et al., 2023 · arxiv.org
Promptable segmentation that changed how quickly you can label images for CV and remote sensing.