← Voices

Vicki Boykis

Machine learning engineer writing candidly on ML systems, embeddings, and the craft of the work.

Blog ↗X ↗

From Vicki Boykis

9 posts
Vicki BoykisSep 1, 2026

Bad code is kudzu

Cultivation of the Vines, Henri Martin Kudzu is a plant that was once introduced from East Asia to the eastern United States as a way to combat soil erosion. But, kudzu, once introduced, grows aggressively and can...

Vicki BoykisAug 12, 2026

Write for people

Something I’ve noticed recently is that I am no longer able to read and parse PR titles and descriptions across the internet. I don’t think I stopped being able to read or understand code, but now that we...

Vicki BoykisApr 20, 2026

Build yourself flowers

This is an edited transcript of the keynote I gave at the Applied Machine Learning Conference in Charlottesville, VA in April 2026. I first wrote a draft of this talk by hand. This part took 2 months. I then recorded...

Vicki BoykisApr 13, 2026

Mechanical sympathy

Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design....