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tunç polat

ai engineer at coop. shipping ai apps by day, going deep on how language models actually work by night, running small saas in the in-between hours.

this site is where i think out loud. long-running notes on the subjects i'm in the middle of, smaller asides on the side, and a record of the things i'm shipping.


§ now

currently writing — wk 23 · 2026
  • building an llm from scratchattention — current chapter
  • therapieberichtdata protection pass
  • language islandsgetting traction
  • zazaki islandsbuilding the database with my mother

§ threads

  1. 01day

    ai engineer at coop

    shipping production ai for switzerland's largest retailer. mostly the engineering layer underneath the model — evaluation, observability, latency, the stuff that decides whether ai tools actually get used at scale.

  2. 02study

    building an llm from scratch

    from first principles. tokenization, attention, training, fine-tuning. everything goes into the notebook as i learn it.

  3. 03night

    indie saas

    language-islands.com (web, ios, android) and therapiebericht.ch — both shipped with kaan sentürk. zazaki-islands.com is a non-profit i run on my own: a place where native speakers translate and pass on an endangered language.


§ notebook

not posts — each subject is a single, growing document. sections pile up; conceptual asides sit in the margins.

  • 01#llm

    building an llm from scratch

    reading raschka. tokens → attention → trained model — eventually one that works for an endangered language.

    sections
    12
    sections
    asides
    5
    asides
    touched today
  • 02#devops

    docker & kubernetes

    udemy course in the background. containers, orchestration, the pieces that make a deploy boring on purpose.

    sections
    3
    sections
    asides
    1
    asides
    touched yesterday
all subjects →


§ desk

  • readingbuild a large language model (from scratch)sebastian raschka
  • watchingdocker & kubernetes — the practical guideudemy course
  • queuednothing yet — send me a recommendation