personal site · index
tunç polat
ai engineer at coop. shipping ai apps by day, going deep on how language models actually work by night, running small saas in the in-between hours.
this site is where i think out loud. long-running notes on the subjects i'm in the middle of, smaller asides on the side, and a record of the things i'm shipping.
§ now
- building an llm from scratchattention — current chapter
- voice practice for therapistsearly build · no name yet
- language islandsgetting traction
- zazaki islandsbuilding the database with my mother
§ threads
- 01day
ai engineer at coop
shipping production ai for switzerland's largest retailer. mostly the engineering layer underneath the model — evaluation, observability, latency, the stuff that decides whether ai tools actually get used at scale.
- 02study
building an llm from scratch
from first principles. tokenization, attention, training, fine-tuning. everything goes into the notebook as i learn it.
- 03night
indie saas
language-islands.com (web, ios, android), shipped with kaan sentürk. zazaki-islands.com is a non-profit i run on my own: a place where native speakers translate and pass on an endangered language. currently building a voice app where trainee therapists practise with ai patients.
§ notebook
not posts — each subject is a single, growing document. sections pile up; conceptual asides sit in the margins.
- 01#voice
Voice Agents from First Principles
How a machine hears you, decides you're done, understands you, thinks and answers out loud. Samples, turn-taking, speech recognition, agents and speech synthesis, built up byte by byte.
- sections
- 0 sections
- asides
- 0 asides
touched 4d ago - 02#rag
Chunking Strategies
Coming soon.
- sections
- 0 sections
- asides
- 0 asides
touched 2026-06-21 - 03#llm
Building an LLM from Scratch
Reading Raschka's book end-to-end. Tokens, attention, training, a small model — laying the groundwork to one day train one for Zazakî.
- sections
- 4 sections
- asides
- 4 asides
touched 2026-06-05
§ shipped
small saas. most built with kaan sentürk; one is a non-profit i run on my own. each solves a specific problem for a specific person.
language-islands.com
language islands
a language-learning method organised around two opposing tracks: easy listening and hard active recall. web, ios, android. built with kaan sentürk.
- next.js
- expo
- prisma
- ai sdk
zazaki-islands.com
zazaki islands
a non-profit i run on my own — a place where native speakers translate and record everyday sentences in an endangered language. no machine translation; volunteers do the work.
- next.js
- prisma
- postgres
in progress · no name yet
voice practice for therapists
trainee therapists practise the hard moments of a session out loud, with ai patients, then get a calm supervision. built voice-first, from the audio bytes up.
- next.js
- expo
- fastapi
- pydantic ai
§ desk
- readingbuild a large language model (from scratch)— sebastian raschka
- queuednothing yet — send me a recommendation