15. Neural Network built from scratch [Coding Challenge]
Prologue
I’ll make this one short. I wanted to test my skills in the basics of neural networks, hence I challenged myself to code one up from scratch in NumPy. Another goal of mine was to try and articulate technical things out loud. I learned a ton from actually talking about and implementing the maths, which I did surprisingly well, if I may say so myself. I had to search for the softmax and cross-entropy loss formulas, and also ended up using AI after hours of debugging, just to find that all my struggles could be traced back to a single line. Definitely a success nonetheless. There is about 10 hours of recording, but it was distilled down to 2½ hours: