Vicki Boykis
20 stories
Vicki BoykisVoicesBad code is kudzu Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion.
Vicki BoykisVoicesWrite for people Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet.
Vicki BoykisVoicesRunning local models is good now I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now.
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesWe should be more tired than the model Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation.
Vicki BoykisVoicesTagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs. You can see the tags in the sidebar to the right (or in the footer on mobile).
Vicki BoykisVoicesBuild yourself flowers This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand.
Vicki BoykisVoicesMechanical sympathy Weaver, seen from the Front , Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good…
Vicki BoykisVoicesOn Programming Joy and Octocat While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility , I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be.
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesNASA Elements of Engineering Excellence I stumbled across this report from NASA , “Elements of Engineering Excellence”, published in 2012, The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC…
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesAntidote If you love building things, and the process of building is just as important to you as the result itself, it’s not unreasonable that you’re in a slump these days.
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesQuerying 3 billion vectors Recently, I got nerd-sniped by this exchange between Jeff Dean and someone trying to query 3 billion vectors.
Vicki BoykisVoices2025 in review Jeune fille lisant une lettre à la bougie, Jean-Baptiste Santerre, 1700 Machine learning engineers spend their lives alternating between two states: staring at tqdm progress bars during model…
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesI want to see the claw I respect quality software and the people who write it. And, I’ve invested years of my life in working on becoming one of these people ( even if the journey has been long and hard and has involved…
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoicesWalking around the app There is a very vigorous debate happening online right now around what shape evaluation for LLM-based products should take.
Vicki BoykisVoicesHow big are our embeddings now and why? A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings . At the time, I wrote that 200-300 dimension embeddings were fairly common in industry, and that adding more dimensions during training would create…
Vicki BoykisVoicesEnabling Hugo static site search with Lunr.js There comes a time in every woman’s life when she only wants one thing: for her mininmal static site to finally have some of the same features that dynamic blogging platforms do, namely search.
Vicki BoykisVoicesMy favorite use-case for AI is writing logs One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023).
Vicki Boykis
Vicki BoykisVoices20 years of YC I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger , but to me the two go hand in hand.
Vicki BoykisVoicesYou can just hack on ATProto 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.
Vicki BoykisVoicesHow FastAPI path operations work 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.
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