Summer 2025 in Review

Originally I had planned to write about both my internship at Vercel and my personal projects/learning experiences, but I decided to split the topics into two posts. Expect to hear more about my internship soon!

In the meantime, here's a brief overview of the non-work-related events of my summer. This will function as a cross between a journal entry, blog post, and "brag list" that potential employers can see ;), so apologies in advance if it seems like I'm tooting my own horn.

AI Projects

I finally learned how to write GPU kernels using a few cool resources! In conjunction with this, I made a (very much WIP) PyTorch-like library for WebGPU-accelerated computation in JavaScript. I'm calling it shade (get it, like shaders?) I have yet to add backpropagation, though.

I also released a few projects related to tokenization, a field which I've been very interested in: tokka-bench, a toolkit for evaluating/benchmarking tokenizers across multiple languages, and tokka, a toolkit for easily training tokenizers on custom mixes of data.

Since working with large amounts of data using just HuggingFace Datasets is difficult, I wrote hf_to_mds — a script for easily converting datasets to MosaicML Streaming format and uploading them to the HuggingFace Hub! I made an MDS version of the Wikipedia dataset and would like to convert more, but am still waiting to hear back about getting my storage limits raised.

Finally, I wrote a LessWrong article about how humans are changing their speech patterns to sound distinct from LLMs. It was featured on the frontpage, which is pretty neat!

Random Stuff

• After years of procrastination, I finally learned the Vim keybindings! It's been surprisingly useful. I switched to LazyVim for a while, and now I'm on Zed.
• Speaking of Zed, I'm working on a LazyVim-inspired config with leader-key keyboard shortcuts. Hope to release it soon! I also merged a PR to let users hide the title bar.
• I finally bit the bullet and rebranded from @nebrelbug to @bgub on GitHub! I'm @bgub_ on X... lmk if you know how I can get @bgub!
• This website looks significantly better after I updated the UI with styling help from v0. And I added a cool "Explain Like I'm 5" button for streaming AI-powered post summaries!
• Over the summer I used macOS long-term for the first time. I liked it less than I expected (auto-tiling is much worse than on Linux) so I am still daily-driving Linux on my personal machine. I used Omarchy for a few weeks, then switched back to Fedora with COSMIC desktop, which I may have helped inspire (but realistically probably didn't.)
• Trying out so many different OS options made me tired of setting up my computer over and over, so I learned how to use Nix! I made a config with home-manager for my work MacBook, and an associated public template. My setup also works with Linux machines, but I haven't upstreamed those changes to the template.
• At Vercel, I wrote a 7-chapter tutorial explaining how to build a React framework from scratch. I haven't published it yet but hope to soon!

Finally, a few updates from the last few weeks (it's not technically summer anymore but I'm too tired to write more posts).

• I released a template for TS libraries using modern tooling like release-please, Vitest, tsdown, and Biome.
• I released a new, ESM-only version of eta using said tooling.
• I updated eta.js.org and squirrelly.js.org to use FumaDocs instead of Docusaurus, support better versioning, etc.