Interactive curriculum
Inference Illustrated
A guided tour through LLM inference and the network underneath it, built for storage and networking professionals.
Erik Smith · Massachusetts
Engineer, teacher, and builder of things that make complex systems legible.
Twenty-five years of optimizing infrastructure for humans, now applying those lessons while building agentic AI systems, writing about how they work, and making the hard parts visible through interactive tools.
Section 01
Selected projects
Open-source platform
ProtoViz
An interactive protocol visualization platform covering sixteen-plus network and storage protocols. MIT and CC BY 4.0.
Educational app
Binary Digit Trainer
A browser-based neural network learning app. Reposted by SNIA. The simplest useful thing I have ever built.
Section 02
Recent writing
Section 03
About
I build to understand. Most of what I publish here is a by-product of that: a prototype I needed to see working, a diagram that finally made a concept click, a post written because explaining something to someone else is how I figure out whether I actually know it.
By day I'm a Distinguished Engineer at Dell, working on agentic AI systems and the infrastructure they run on. The opinions here are mine.
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