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Nikita Arsenov
Nikita Arsenov

Posted on Originally published at kniffy.hashnode.dev on

Hello World: From Sysadmin to Reinforcement Learning

Hey everyone, I'm Nikita.

I'm starting this blog as a home for my technical notes, side projects, and random deep dives. To be completely honest, I don't have a rigid roadmap for where this blog is heading—part of it is simply wanting a space for creative and technical self-expression.

A Quick Background

I’m a Ukrainian-Russian engineer by training, with around 4 years of experience in system administration. Over the last 1.5 years, I’ve been actively diving into Machine Learning, with a particular interest in cognitive science and reinforcement learning.

The Spark

Like many hobbies that turn into obsessions, it started with a single project: building and training a small-scale, AlphaZero-inspired model combining CNN + DQN + LSTM architectures.

It wasn't an overnight success. It took roughly three months of relentless tweaking—redesigning the architecture, fixing gradient issues, and fine-tuning reward functions—before the model finally started showing real, intelligent results. That breakthrough moment was when everything clicked: I realized just how much I love this field, and experimenting with ML officially became my main passion.

What to Expect Here

Going forward, this blog will be a mix of:

  • Ongoing ML and reinforcement learning experiments

  • Notes and thoughts on cognitive architectures

  • Practical takeaways, debugging stories, and engineering logs

Thanks for stopping by! If you're interested in ML, cognitive systems, or just like following along with hands-on technical experiments, feel free to connect or drop a comment.

Tags: #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #ReinforcementLearning #DevLog #Beginner

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