Blog

Technical notes on NLP, stylometry, and the systems I build. No filler.

November 11, 202511 min read

Measuring your own writing voice, one function word at a time

How I built a tool that turns a few of your writing samples into a measurable fingerprint, scores how far a draft has drifted from it, and nudges it back, with honest numbers about what the signal can and cannot do.

NLPStylometryStyle TransferPython

Read post

November 1, 202514 min read

When a speech-emotion model is really just recognizing the actors

A speech-emotion model can look impressive and still be mostly memorizing the 24 RAVDESS actors. Here is the leak, the speaker-independent pipeline that replaced it (frozen WavLM, layer weighting, attentive pooling, calibrated late fusion), and the one number I will stand behind: 78.8%.

SpeechEmotion RecognitionEvaluationWavLMMultimodal

Read post

July 24, 202514 min read

Hybrid RAG retrieval on a free CPU, and the evaluation where the fancy pipeline did not win

A plain-language walkthrough of ContextIQ: dense plus BM25 retrieval, reciprocal rank fusion, cross-encoder reranking, and grounded generation, all on a free CPU, with an honest four-way evaluation where no single arm sweeps every metric.

RAGRetrievalEmbeddingsBM25RerankingEvaluation

Read post

July 15, 202512 min read

The Virtual Bank System: event-driven microservices and a correct transfer saga

A study guide to the Virtual Bank System: five Spring Boot services behind a gateway, synchronous REST at the edge and an event-driven transfer saga over Kafka. It explains the architecture, the transfer step by step, and the three mechanisms that keep the money path correct: the transactional outbox, idempotent consumers, and pessimistic locking.

MicroservicesEvent-DrivenSpring BootKafkaDistributed SystemsBackend

Read post