Writing on tech, software engineering, and side projects.https://rohitbele.com/https://rohitbele.com/blog/the-tax-you-cant-avoid-paying/https://rohitbele.com/blog/the-tax-you-cant-avoid-paying/A pattern I keep running into across very different parts of learning: every real shortcut turns out to just move the difficulty somewhere less visible, not remove it.Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/information-is-not-knowledge/https://rohitbele.com/blog/information-is-not-knowledge/Being able to retrieve an answer and understanding it are different capacities, and it's never been easier to confuse them for each other.Fri, 24 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/https://rohitbele.com/blog/implementing-a-neural-network-from-scratch/Backpropagation is simple in theory and unforgiving in practice. Here's what actually went wrong when I built one with nothing but numpy, and how gradient checking saved me.Fri, 03 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/learning-in-public-is-harder-than-it-sounds/https://rohitbele.com/blog/learning-in-public-is-harder-than-it-sounds/The advice is simple to state and uncomfortable to actually follow, for reasons that have less to do with time and more to do with ego.Fri, 19 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/llms-and-the-changing-role-of-engineers/https://rohitbele.com/blog/llms-and-the-changing-role-of-engineers/The part of the job that's shrinking isn't the part most people worry about. It's not thinking that's getting outsourced — it's typing.Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/how-to-study-a-hard-technical-book/https://rohitbele.com/blog/how-to-study-a-hard-technical-book/Not reading advice in general — specifically what to do with a book full of exercises and proofs that's too dense to read the way you'd read anything else.Tue, 05 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/data-pipeline-reliability-lessons/https://rohitbele.com/blog/data-pipeline-reliability-lessons/Pipelines rarely fail loudly. They fail by quietly producing plausible-looking wrong answers, which is a much harder problem than a crash.Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/attention-is-the-scarce-resource/https://rohitbele.com/blog/attention-is-the-scarce-resource/We talk about time management, but time was never really the constraint. What actually runs out, faster and less predictably, is attention.Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/a-system-for-studying-hard-subjects/https://rohitbele.com/blog/a-system-for-studying-hard-subjects/Motivation runs out. What's replaced it is a small set of habits that make studying a hard subject less dependent on how I happen to feel that day.Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/what-gradient-descent-actually-does/https://rohitbele.com/blog/what-gradient-descent-actually-does/Stripped of the vector calculus notation, gradient descent is just a rule for guessing better. Here's the mechanical version I wish someone had shown me first.Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/the-book-that-changed-how-i-read/https://rohitbele.com/blog/the-book-that-changed-how-i-read/Richard Hamming's The Art of Doing Science and Engineering didn't teach me a new technique. It taught me to stop reading for information and start reading for judgment.Thu, 22 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://rohitbele.com/blog/learning-ml-from-first-principles/https://rohitbele.com/blog/learning-ml-from-first-principles/Notes on the gap between knowing how to call a library and actually understanding what it's doing, and why I decided to close it the slow way.Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT