IzyMaps: Building a Shopify Store Locator App December 26, 2025 Entrepreneurship Shopify After building Beachin’ Rentals and integrating it with Shopify, I noticed a recurring pain point among merchants: adding a simple, good-looking store locator to their website was surprisingly difficult. Existing solutions were either overly complex, required technical knowledge to set up, or were ridiculously expensive for such simple functionality. This... Read more
The Evolution of AdamW December 20, 2025 AI Machine Learning In deep learning (DL), we aim to find the optimal weights $\mathbf{W}$ and biases $\mathbf{b}$ with respect to a cost function. As the name suggests, deep neural networks consist of many layers chained together, leading to a highly complex computational graph. Since calculating the exact inverse of these chained layers... Read more
Backpropagation in Practice December 20, 2025 AI Machine Learning The “magic” behind the modern deep learning revolution isn’t just the architectures themselves, but our ability to train them efficiently. At the heart of this efficiency lies backpropagation, an algorithm that is often misunderstood as a “black box.” In reality, it is an elegant application of the Multivariate Chain Rule,... Read more
Automating a Beach Rental Store December 08, 2025 IoT Entrepreneurship This is the story of Beachin’ Rentals, our first venture into the world of physical retail. Located just three minutes from the sand in Barceloneta, we set out to provide high-quality beach equipment to locals and tourists alike. However, we quickly ran into a fundamental problem: the cost of staffing.... Read more
Pruning vs. Quantization: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis December 06, 2025 AI Machine Learning In the domain of efficient deep learning inference, the trade-off between model size and accuracy is usually managed through two primary compression techniques: pruning (inducing sparsity by removing weights) and quantization (reducing the bit-width of weights and activations). While both have extensive literature, a direct, rigorous comparison between the two... Read more