a learning journey through ML systems

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As I approach a little over a year since formally starting my journey of self-learning and stumbling through the world of ML systems, I wanted to look back and recap / document my entire roadmap and the insane rabbit holes I’ve fallen through during the past year, and also outline what my goals are for the next couple months.

The real story started in my sophomore year of college, when I started my project GroundUpNeuralNet, a very minimal implementation of an MLP library I wrote in C++ after taking a DSA class. At this point, I wasn’t very concerned (or knowledgeable) about performance, so I leaned heavily on Eigen for the compute. Nevertheless, I still learned a good deal about multivariate calc, backprop, and just generally how to structure a relatively big C++ project. You can still play around with it today here , although it only supports linear layers and a handful of activation + loss functions.

Personal on Daniel Park

a learning journey through ML systems