Curious experiments, in public

Things I make with
words, numbers & lines

Essays, data explorations, and drawings — having fun with AI and data, and showing what I find. By Ellen Hirt.

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Words

Essays and shorter notes on AI/ML, creativity, and life as a working mum in tech.

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Numbers

Data explorations and AI/ML tutorials — charts, questions, and the occasional rabbit hole.

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Lines

Sketches, illustrations, and visual experiments. Sometimes just for the fun of it.

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Latest

Recent work

2026-07-09 11 honest tips for your AI/ML job searchvia Medium Navigating an ever-more-competitive field, honestly. 2026-05-11 Returning to AI/ML after maternity leave: six weeks invia Medium What changed in the field, and in me, while I was away. 2024-12-19 Exploring our wonderful world with geospatial datavia Medium Understanding the intricate wonders of describing our world in data. 2024-11-13 Six steps to improve your RAG application's data foundationvia Databricks With Pascal Vogel — the data groundwork most RAG apps skip. 2024-11-04 Getting started with fine-tuning on Databricksvia Databricks With Narjes Majdoub & Giran Moodley — when and how to fine-tune LLMs. 2024-10-24 Building a cost-optimized chatbot with semantic cachingvia Databricks Cutting LLM costs by reusing responses to similar questions. 2023-09-22 Introducing LangChain: a beginner's guide 🦜🔗via Medium Build applications with LLMs using LangChain. 2023-06-05 Level up your data science work with Pandas AIvia Medium Adding LLM superpowers to your Pandas analysis tasks. 2019-12-03 5 Fragen an: Women in Tech & PyLadies Karlsruheinterview, DE On co-founding PyLadies Karlsruhe and getting more women into IT.

Elsewhere

Also writing at

Substack

Words Numbers Lines, the newsletter — where curiosity meets creativity, driven by data.

Medium

Tutorials and essays on AI/ML and data — including pieces in the Data Science Collective.

Articles & tutorials

Databricks Blog

Technical deep-dives on GenAI — semantic caching, RAG, and fine-tuning.

Talks & interviews

Speaking at Data Natives, interviews on women in tech, and co-founding PyLadies.

    "The three notations — prose, figures, and drawings — are just different pens for the same thinking."
    — the idea behind this site
  