Backprop Diaries v1.0
Backprop Diaries
// ABOUT — README.md

Writing
for engineers
who still read
the source.

Backprop Diaries is a long-form technical blog about the parts of software that don't fit in a tweet.

I write essays about full-stack engineering, AI internals, developer tools, and architecture — for people who have shipped software, broken it, and put it back together. Every post is drafted, edited, and tested against the implementation it describes.

There is no growth team. There are no SEO articles. There is no podcast. The newsletter goes out on Monday and that's the only schedule I keep.

// FOUNDED
2026.06
// ARTICLES
0
// EDITOR
amir
// TOTAL.WORDS
0
// AVG.READ.TIME
—
// CADENCE
weekly
// PRINCIPLES — V1.0

What I believe
about technical writing.

01 /

Long-form, by default.

If a topic deserves coverage, it deserves the room to make a real argument. I don't chop posts into thread-sized chunks for engagement.

02 /

Source over surface.

I link to source code, papers, and primary documentation. Where possible, I run the code. If a claim isn't reproducible, I mark it as opinion.

03 /

Diagrams that diagram.

Boxes-and-arrows should explain something a paragraph can't. If a diagram is decoration, I delete it.

04 /

No LLM filler.

Drafts are written by me. I use AI tools for spell-check and rubber-ducking, never to generate body copy. You'd notice anyway.

05 /

Postmortems welcome.

The most useful technical writing is the kind that explains what went wrong. I publish mine, and host other engineers' when they need a venue.

06 /

Calm typography.

Dark theme by default. No autoplay. No popups. No paywalls. Just text and code, at a size you can read.

// FOCUS — TAXONOMY.SET

What I cover.

01 / SECTION
AI & ML internals
Models as engineered artifacts. Embeddings, evals, inference, retrieval, fine-tuning — written for engineers, not influencers.
02 / SECTION
Full-stack engineering
Frontend to backend and everything between — APIs, data layers, queues, caches, and the UI on top. How the whole request travels, and the failure modes at every hop.
03 / SECTION
Developer tools
Editors, compilers, build systems, the tooling that compounds. Reviews, deep dives, and field notes.
04 / SECTION
Architecture
Decisions that live for five years. Tradeoffs at the API, service, and org level — and how to write them down so they survive.
05 / SECTION
Engineering notes
Short-form essays — postmortems, opinions, half-finished thoughts. Less polished, more honest.
// EDITOR — TEAM[0]

Who's writing this.

1 contributor, 1 editor, 0 marketers
Amir Mohamed
@amir · Sole editor

Engineer and writer. Backprop Diaries is where I think out loud about the full stack, AI internals, and the boring parts of software that matter most.

Contact
// COLOPHON

Built like the things I write about.

Backprop Diaries is a static site built with Astro. Posts are MDX with custom directives for diagrams, code, and callouts. Code is highlighted at build time with Shiki. The site is plain HTML and CSS once it leaves the build — no analytics, no trackers, no ad network.

typographyGeist · Geist Mono · Instrument Serif generatorAstro 6 + MDX highlightShiki (github-dark-default) mathKaTeX analyticsnone licenseCC BY-NC-SA 4.0