the practice behind the lab
The Library
The lab publishes measurements. The Library is where the understanding gets built first: one private study practice, three wings, one rule. Go one level below what the job requires, every day, and write it down well enough to teach.
Below the Waterline
the atlas · privateA nightly atlas of how real systems actually work: case studies and ground-floor primers on MapReduce, Kafka's storage engine, vector search, LSM engines, GPUs, and LLM serving. Every piece descends from the business problem to the metal, with diagrams doing half the teaching.
Six artifacts and counting. Private by design: the writing leans on first-person operational detail, so it stays on the shelf it was written for.
The Study Shelf
practice · privateWorking curricula run against real prototypes: an applied-AI systems course built module by module, and a forward-deployed engineering masterclass for data people. Every module ends in something that runs, and each carries a fifteen-minute daily rep.
The operating rule is one rep a day, every day. A streak counter keeps the score honest.
Essays
writing · surfacingFifteen pieces in plain English: the machinery under data tools, the craft of AI systems that hold up, the practice of learning one level down, and studio notes from building a synthesizer with a model in the room.
Essays publish here as research notes once they are rewritten public-native and edited by hand.
What has surfaced so far
Two library pieces have been rewritten public-native and live on the research shelf: A model in the room and What mixing taught me about evals. More follow the same path: written privately, tested against real work, then rewritten clean for this shelf.
for the two of us
The shelves themselves live behind a login at library.coconutlabs.org. If your email is not on the short list, the door does not open, and that is the point. The public versions of anything worth publishing land in research and the masterclass.