Welcome to the LLM Engineering for Busy Builders Series

A practical, hands-on series for builders who want to learn how to engineer real-world LLM applications — one step at a time. From environment setup to agents and evaluation, follow along as we build, break, and learn together.

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LLM Engineering: Part 0 – The Series Introduction

Published on Jan 10, 2025

The opening post of the LLM Engineering for Busy Builders series explains why this series exists and what to expect. We outline the key themes, upcoming topics, and set the tone: lightweight, practical, and written while learning. Think of it as a living build-log for real-world LLM systems.

LLM Engineering: Part 0.5 The LLM Engineering Glossary

Published on Jan 13, 2025

This glossary-style post is your quick reference guide to common terms in LLM Engineering. From embeddings and vector stores to prompt injection and token limits, it breaks down the jargon you'll encounter while building with GenAI. Ideal for beginners or anyone grokking the space as they build — keep it open as your go-to cheat sheet while working through the series.

LLM Engineering: Part 1 – Minimal Setup

Published on Jan 17, 2025

Part 1 walks you through creating a lightweight but flexible development setup for LLM applications. We build a Conda environment, install key packages, configure JupyterLab, and securely manage API keys — everything you need to get started without overcomplicating it.

LLM Engineering: Part 2 – Prepping Data for Your First LLM Call

Published on Jan 18, 2025

Before making your first LLM call, we need useful input. In this post, we scrape a real FAQ webpage, clean the content using BeautifulSoup, and structure the text to be LLM-ready. It’s a practical walkthrough of preparing raw data for smarter AI output.