Series Posts

Conceptual AI: Through an Architect's Lens

Part 0A: Part 0A: Neural Networks & The Learning Mechanism

Building deep intuition from first principles — how neural networks actually learn, explained step by step for engineers who want to truly understand the machinery before architecting with it.

Conceptual AI: Through an Architect's Lens

Part 0B: Part 0B: From Sequences to Transformers

The journey from “words in order” to “understanding meaning” — how we taught machines to process language, and why the Transformer changed everything.

Conceptual AI: Through an Architect's Lens

Part 1A: Part 1A: Understanding the LLM Machine

The technical foundations that drive every architectural decision — transformers, embeddings, and tokenization- are explained through the lens of cost, performance, and trade-offs.

Conceptual AI: Through an Architect's Lens

Part 1B: Part 1B: Making Decisions with LLMs

From model selection to production reliability — the decision frameworks that separate prototype AI from enterprise systems.

Conceptual AI: Through an Architect's Lens

Part 2A: Part 2A: Production RAG: What Tutorials Don’t Teach You

From naive retrieval to production-grade systems — the architectural patterns, chunking strategies, and retrieval engineering that separate demo RAG from enterprise RAG.

Conceptual The Azure Ascent: A Backend Engineer's Journey to Cloud Mastery

Part 5: Part 5: The Intelligent Layer — Azure AI & Machine Learning

CloudVault wants to add intelligent features to their platform. Marcus explores Azure AI Services (Vision, Language, Speech), Azure OpenAI for LLMs, and Azure Machine Learning. We integrate AI capabilities into a Java backend application and understand when to use pre-built APIs vs. custom models.