Blog #10: Journey’s End

Hey All!

Welcome to my final blog post. I’m pretty sad this will be over soon, but come right along – I have so much to share this week. 

This week, I laid the finishing touches: designing the UI, commenting, and creating a poster. 

For the UI, I mainly fixed the CSS (I figured React is probably overkill for a textbox and a button). I don’t know about you, but I think this is pretty good: 

(Okay it might be giving 2010’s Raz-Kids… I can’t quite put my finger on the problem though…)

As crusty as the UI is, at least the backend works. Basically, on POST, Python Flask sends the input to the RunPod endpoint (where my model is stored and ran) and gets the output as a JSON file. Meanwhile, vanilla JavaScript displays a cute loading GIF and then the output text.

And because open source is awesome, I uploaded my code to GitHub and my fine-tuned model to Hugging Face. 

With all the logistics sorted out, I began working on my poster. Aside from writing and designing a flow chart, it wasn’t much work beyond compiling graphs onto one ppt.

And voilà. This is my project for the time being. 

Before I go, I want to shout out Ms. Rangoli, Dr. Pan, Stack Overflow, the Hugging Face Forums, r/LocalLlama, the Runpod Discord Community, and you, reader, for supporting me along my journey. I couldn’t have done it without you guys. 

Truly, I enjoyed the project so much. This sounds cheesy, but it was never just about attaining a working product. For an amateur high school student (me), the journey and the little things were equally important. Exploring the nooks and crannies, playing around with code, learning random facts from papers, and the kind. Some of my favorite moments include:

– Reading the docs of my first cloud compute service, RunPod
– Playing Tetris while waiting for my model to finish uploading to Hugging Face
– Googling PKU
– Staying up until 2 a.m. watching YT videos about RAGs because I have free will and know how to use it

Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games. Spending an hour debugging only to find out you forgot to keep everything on the same device (= torch.device(“cuda”)) isn’t exactly the most pleasant experience. However, these mistakes sure still were experiences, and I’ve definitely learned to be more thorough through them. 

Welp. I guess this is the end (of the beginning). I hope you found this blog worthy of your time, and I’ll see you around on this vast ocean of an Internet! 

Signing out,
– Luoxi