Timeline

1. 2026-08-19

   Getting shaken up by Go

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   I've been studying a lot of Go these past few weeks, and I mean that literally: I brought The Go Programming Language (the classic Donovan and Kernighan book, Brazilian edition) to the beach. Between waves, I got through a fair amount of it.

   I'm getting a real shake-up trying to adapt to the "way of Go". After years used to Python, my brain has to relearn a much more explicit way of thinking: errors handled by hand instead of exceptions, static typing, concurrency that's part of the language itself instead of a framework bolted on top. Nothing absurd, just a different way of solving the same problem.

   And the enthusiasm is real. I'm feeling a strong pull to gradually migrate toward Golang, mainly for its robustness: the compiler catches a ton of silly mistakes before the code even runs, and the performance is on another level. Unfortunately the Machine Learning and AI ecosystem in Go is still pretty thin on mature libraries, so I can't switch everything over at once. But I think in the long run the language has real potential to become an important piece in that space, especially for serving models in production.

   And yes, the cat decided to show up in one of the photos too. He doesn't study Go with me, he just supervises.

2. 2026-08-18

   Chapter 2 of the SLM book, but with Dom Casmurro

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   Started Chapter 2 of How to Build and Fine-Tune a Small Language Model, by Prof. Paul Liu, and this time the exercise is building a small GPT from scratch, along the lines of Karpathy's "build a GPT", around 10 million parameters.

   Instead of using the book's own example dataset though, I swapped it for a text I genuinely love: Dom Casmurro, by Machado de Assis. Same code, same architecture, but now tokenizing and training on Bentinho and Capitu instead of some generic corpus.

   More updates coming soon once I wrap up this study.