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thucpham / engineering notebook

● AI Engineer / Field notes

Building AI
beyond the demo.

I'm thucpham, an AI Engineer. I build with LLMs and machine learning, and write down what actually works.

Welcome to my blog! I am ThucPham, an AI Engineer. This blog is where I share my knowledge and experience around AI.

thucpham@around-ai: ~
thucpham

~ $ whoami

thucpham

~ $ cat role.txt

AI Engineer

~ $ ls ./interests

llm/ ml/ agents/ self-hosting/

~ $

Hands-on by choice. Curious by default.

1

Published posts

Since 2023

Writing in the open

5

Topics covered

AI Engineer

thucpham

01 / Selected work

From an idea to something useful.

All projects

Open source / Self-hosted

around-ai blog.

Write in markdown. Ship on your own box.

This blog: a self-hosted Next.js + PostgreSQL stack with a markdown editor, running in Docker behind a Cloudflare Tunnel.

Next.jsPostgreSQLDocker
Explore around-ai blog
around-ai / docker compose
$ docker compose ps
NAME      STATUS
app       Up (healthy)
db        Up (healthy)
tunnel    Up

$ curl -s around-ai.com/api/health
{"ok":true}

$ 
Self-hosted. Markdown in, blog out.

02 / How I work

The bigger picture.
The engineering detail.

How I approach AI work: start from the real problem, measure everything, and leave notes the next engineer can use.

Background & experience
  1. 01

    Start with the real constraint.

    Latency, cost, privacy and the people using the system shape the design from day one.

  2. 02

    Make decisions measurable.

    Benchmark the options. Write down the tradeoffs. Trust evidence over a polished demo.

  3. 03

    Build understanding that lasts.

    Share the reasoning and the lessons so the next build starts further ahead.

03 / Current explorations

The questions keeping me curious.

01

LLM applications

Agents, RAG and tool use that hold up outside of a notebook.

02

Machine learning in practice

Training, evaluation and the boring parts that make models useful.

03

Running AI yourself

Self-hosting models and infra: what it costs and what it takes.

04 / Field notes

Building things. Writing it down.

All articles

The next page

Good systems start with a conversation.

Let's talk

Have a project, a question, or an interesting idea? I'd love to hear it.