About Signal & Syntax
Most writing about LLMs sits at one of two altitudes: high-level explainers aimed at executives and curious newcomers, or dense research papers aimed at other researchers. There’s less writing in the middle, where working engineers actually operate. Most engineers need to understand enough of what’s happening under the hood to build and debug real systems, but not so much that they feel like they’re replicating a PhD program.
Signal & Syntax serves that middle altitude. Posts work through the mathematics and engineering underneath the models we’re all building on: gradient descent, attention, tokenization, inference-time behavior, training infrastructure, evaluation, orchestration. The goal is to write about this material the way one engineer explains something to another, with enough rigor to be trustworthy, enough plain English to be readable, and enough specificity that the post helps you build something.
What You’ll Find Here
- Under the hood: how components actually work. Attention mechanisms, tokenizer behavior, loss landscapes, numerical stability.
- Applied engineering: how working systems are built. Orchestration patterns, evaluation frameworks, deployment considerations, production tradeoffs.
- The mathematics: linear algebra, probability, and optimization — the foundations that make everything else make sense.
- Occasional essays: reflections on the industry, the technology, and what it’s like to build in this moment.
How the Site Is Organized
Signal & Syntax offers three ways to explore the material:
Learning Paths are ordered reading sequences designed to build understanding step by step. Earlier articles establish concepts and foundations that later articles build on.
Categories group articles by broad subject area. There’s no required reading order; browse whatever interests you.
Tags connect articles around specific concepts, technologies, and techniques, making it easy to follow a topic across categories and learning paths.
New Here?
New to the material? Start with a Learning Path for an ordered introduction, or browse Categories and Tags if you’re looking for a particular subject.
Roadmap
Signal & Syntax is organized around a growing set of topics that build on one another. Check out the Roadmap to see what’s in progress, what’s planned, and what’s already been published.