Systems Administrator · Denison University · Granville, OH

Essay

Building a world model in your head

Why working in IT infrastructure rewards the same habit ML engineers should be cultivating: a mental simulation of the system you're touching, updated faster than the docs.

InfrastructureMLCraft

Build log

MSA Lite

A scaled-down medical scribe assistant: notes, design decisions, and what I had to throw away before the thing felt useful.

HealthLLMsBuild log

Working draft

Honest evaluation on small datasets

BLEU, F1, AUC, and confusion matrices say different things on a few thousand examples than on a million. A note on which numbers to trust, which to caveat, and which to ignore when you're working at student-project scale.

EvaluationML craft

Working draft

SOM clustering before you reach for a neural net

What unsupervised methods are still good for in 2026, and how Self-Organizing Maps quietly carried the climate-pattern work that the CNN got most of the credit for.

UnsupervisedSOM