About us
Welcome to the frontier of "learning by doing." Seattle Computer Science Nerds is a community dedicated to stripping away the abstractions and rebuilding the foundations of modern computing from the ground up.
If you’ve ever felt like modern frameworks are a "black box," this is where we open them. We don’t just discuss white papers; we implement them. From scratch. No boilerplate, no "import" shortcuts, just logic, data structures, and first principles.
🛠️ What We Do: The "Build Together" Sessions
Our meetups are high-intensity, hands-on workshops where we tackle specific domains through pure implementation. We move beyond the API calls to understand the why and how.
Focus Domains
• Distributed Systems: Building Raft or Paxos consensus algorithms, DHTs, and fault-tolerant storage.
• Machine Learning & NLP: Implementing backpropagation, transformer architectures, and tokenizers without high-level libraries.
• Computer Vision & Spatial Computing: Writing rasterizers, SLAM algorithms, and point-cloud processing from linear algebra basics.
• Database Internals: Creating B-Trees, LSM-trees, query optimizers, and WAL (Write-Ahead Logging) systems.
• Computational Geometry: Developing Voronoi diagrams, convex hulls, and spatial indexing structures like R-Trees.
🧭 Our Philosophy: First Principles
We believe that the best way to master a complex system is to reinvent it. Whether it's a compiler, a neural network, or a distributed key-value store, we follow a simple ritual:
- Deconstruct: Break the domain down into its mathematical or logical primitives.
- Architect: Map out the system flow on a whiteboard.
- Implement: Get into the code and build the MVP (Minimum Viable Product).
🤝 Who Should Join?
This group is for the curious, the pedantic, and the builders. Whether you are a senior engineer looking to deepen your systems knowledge or a student hungry for "under the hood" experience, if you enjoy low-level details and high-level systems design, you’ll find your tribe here.
Bring your laptop, your favorite IDE, and a first-principles mindset.
Upcoming events
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