Tech Blog on ✰Vicki Boykis✰

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.

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet.

I’ve been working with local models since they came out, and finally, they’re surprisingly good now.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation.

I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs.

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026.

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 at at product design.

While GitHub has been busy losing its last nine of availablility, I’ve been thinking about how the internet used to be.

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 Engineering in 2006 who asked that we investigate the question: “How do you

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.

Recently, I got nerd-sniped by this exchange between Jeff Dean and someone trying to query 3 billion vectors.

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 training and staring at error logs during model inference.

I respect quality software and the people who write it.

There is a very vigorous debate happening online right now around what shape evaluation for LLM-based products should take.

A few years ago, I wrote a paper on embeddings.

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.

One of my favorite AI dev products today is Full Line Code Completion in PyCharm (bundled with the IDE since late 2023).

I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary.

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.

If you’re building a new Python web app these days, there’s a good chance you’re using FastAPI.