DEV Community: Vinodh Thiagarajan

The Vocabulary of GPUs for Gen AI Engineers

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 23:46:43 +0000

The conversation around GPUs in Gen AI talks often jumps straight to "just rent an H100" without explaining why.

I wrote a visual guide covering the vocabulary that actually matters:

🔹 Why GPUs over CPUs (it's not just "more cores")
🔹 HBM vs GDDR — why your RTX 4090 can't run Llama 405B
🔹 FLOPs, TFLOPS, and what those spec sheets actually mean
🔹 Precision formats: FP32 → FP16 → BF16 → FP8
🔹 The memory formula: Parameters × Bytes = VRAM needed
🔹 How inference actually works — from prompt to prediction
🔹 Temperature: the inference-time knob everyone uses but few explain

This isn't about which GPU to buy.

It's about building the mental model so you can read a spec sheet, estimate memory requirements, and have informed conversations about infrastructure.

Part 1 of a 3-part series - https://medium.com/@vinodh.thiagarajan/the-vocabulary-of-gpus-for-ml-budding-gen-ai-engineers-7a693b53b74b

Open Api Spec 3 - All you need to know Series

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 20:11:20 +0000

Open API specification 3.x is the widely accepted way of defining Web API software contracts. In this series, I will be covering how to use open API spec version 3.x using the Swagger hub tool suite and create an end to the end product. I Will be using Swagger UI, Swagger editor, and Swagger Code Gen. We will be using AWS cloud to give life to the contract. Will be covering the same that’s different parts videos.

This is where I will be adding the upcoming videos. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm77mruelczpIsjjurNAtsx6Onf6Km6VK

The current video is https://youtu.be/IPFUUB1ROMU

Always looking for New Subscribers!

Learn to Touch Type - It's Not too Late

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 18:18:53 +0000

Growing up in India and completing my Engineering in the late 2000s I haven't seen the emphasis on the Touch Typing back home even when most of the Engineers land Software Jobs. I hope things must have changed now though. Being in my early 30s now, this article is about how I started learning Touch Typing and how it has helped me with my Productivity as a Software Engineer.

Where to Learn

https://www.typingclub.com/login.html - Yes I paid and still paying until I reach Fluent 75
https://www.typingtest.com/ - Though the above site gives great insight and Analytics. You get too used to the platform and I felt I'm fast only with the above site and its interface and falling behind in the other sites. So this is a great place to do the Litmus testing.
http://learntyping.org/ - If you don't want to pay this is a great site used by millions of people.

What Keyboards to use

Go Mechanical. The Chicklet style of Laptop keyboards will become very friendly when you are comfortable with Mechanical. You won't get the depth and finger navigation accuracy with Laptop Keyboards if that's your first choice in learning. Also, I personally feel the clicking sound "Tak Tak Tak" gives the high, but mechanical keyboards are not a great choice in an office space as it might annoy others. But Go Mechanical when you learn.

My investments

After lot of research, I bought this

but actually, I want to buy this

but it's quite a reach for a beginner.

Never underestimate the power of the wrist pad when it comes to Touch Typing. You don't want to develop tennis elbow.

How Long and How Fast:

There are 84 keys in the keyboard I bought and a few more combinations. Our fingers are very familiar with Space, Enter, and Del keys. So you just need to become fluent with 81 keys, that's the way I saw it.

Right now I stand at ~50-60 wpm after logging ~40 hrs of training spanning over a period of 1 year. That might sound like a lengthy span. But honestly, I gave up and went dormant for ~7-8 months and took it up again. The goal is 75 and I will happily settle there. While there are developers who can easily touch 120s and 140s. 75 is more than enough according to me, with more practice I can bump it even more but again 75 is enough.

Since I touch new speeds now and was dormant for over 3 quarters I'm able to compare how bad I was and where I have come in with respect to speed.

This is the in-depth analysis of my touching style and this is where I stand.

Reflection

As a Software Engineer, this has worked out for me well. Following are the benefits I saw,

I can blog pretty quickly now
I can write Tech Docs in much lesser time and with less stress
An Udemy course which is ~ 4hrs with code along materials takes me ~ 5-6 hrs to complete as I can quickly type it out and previously it took maybe 7-9 hrs.
Things are less intimidating as the effort of typing has become effortless and the fingers know what they are doing and we can totally focus just on the monitor.

Shortcut

There are lots of keyboard shortcuts that will cut down your need for a mouse. I haven't reached there yet, but right now Option + Backspace deletes the whole word because what I have noticed is once you mistype a complex word, we often use Backspace, Backspace, Backspace instead of Option + Backspace deletes the whole word. It comes in very handy for a beginner believe me.

15 - 30 mins a day is more than enough. Do not give up, you will get there. It's all about consistency.

Warning

Until you reach 30+ hours or real good logging do not invite others like "Hey, See How Fast I can Type !!", that's the time you will be the worst typist ( happened to me a bunch of times ), also don't think that you are touch typing and feel good about yourself when you are actually typing it messes with your head and makes you produce bad results.

Deploy Vue.js Application using AWS Amplify

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Tue, 22 Sep 2020 02:04:58 +0000

You know what you want to learn and you will see what you want to see, no small talk.

Building FullStack Serverless Application using AWS-SAM — Part 5/5

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 13:32:34 +0000

Being a procrastinator this series is a new benchmark for me. I hereby complete what I intended to do.

In the last 1 month, I have delivered ~2 hours worth of hands-on content where a Fullstack Serverless Application was built using the AWS's Serverless Application Model.

This is the stack,

UI built using Vue.js
Backend using AWS Lambda
Persistence using AWS Dynamo DB
Service rendering using AWS API Gateway
Static Hosting using AWS Amplify

Backend GitHub -> https://github.com/VinodhThiagarajan1309/sam-food-truck-endpoints

Vue FrontEnd -> https://github.com/VinodhThiagarajan1309/food-truck-app

Feel free to fork and send in interesting PR if at all interested.

This is the very recent and the final part of the series ->

This is the whole series playlist -> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLm77mruelczpEolgQCKa4S9cNkCMp7qSv

Vinodh

Building FullStack Serverless Application using AWS-SAM — Part 4

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:46:00 +0000

Part 4/5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hIG2B4tNm0

Have kept my accountability this far just 1 more episode to knockout. I will be glad if there is traction but this whole exercise is more about me than the audience and to follow the inner invocation and delivering on commitment.

Another article that I wrote based on this Exercise - https://dev.to/vinodhthiagarajan1309/how-to-learn-vue-js-quickly-fj7

How to learn Vue.js Quickly

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Fri, 11 Sep 2020 15:34:27 +0000

This is not exactly the entire topic about Vue but it's about, for a non-UI developer how long does it take to get up and running with Vue.js. This came up as a part of my Serverless Series and I wanted to showcase a complete package of a Serverless application. When I peeked into the UI world in 2020 and researching what it has to offer, I evaluated React first and moved to Vue and got what I want.

This is not a biased view of Vue because now I think that React is equally or even more powerful. But it all boils down to where you learn from and how concise and modular the material is. I trust my Udemy course finding instincts and also I search for tutorials on other platforms too.

Believe me, there is much more material out there to learn React and Angular compared to Vue. But the hours of training range from 7+ to 40+ hours. They do cover fine-grained details of React starting from Basics to much more advanced topics like Redux and Webhooks. But I was not sure what all I needed to know in the first place, like do I need to know about Redux? Typescript? How long do I need to spend to bring up a simple Single Page Application which will hardly take 1 hr for a seasoned UI developer to give a proto/wireframe?

I even started learning React and after an hour or so, these videos were not taking me anywhere. So stumbled upon more comparisons and read this phrase by luck in on the blogs and this is how it goes,

When You Want to Hire a talented Vue.js Developer, just look for a talented Javascript developer because he can get the swing of Vue in a week or so..

Lines like above gave me more confidence to go with Vue. That's all it took and then again I stumbled upon VueSchool and VueMastery as they were recommended on the Vue website to learn from. I went with VueMastery because all it took for me to put together a production-grade Single Page Application was 2 hrs.

The site offers 3 paths and I took the Beginner Path which has about 10 hrs of materials spanning over 7 modules and each module is complete in its own way and I just took the first 2 courses and got what I want.

The above shows a very simple yet functionally decently wired UI that I was able to produce.

Even though the video link is a part of a bigger module this is exclusive to Vue and you will get the context of it, my terminologies will be sloppy as I'm not a UI developer. But if you are a Backend Developer like me and want to wire something quickly to showcases stuff, Vue was very promising.

I do talk about other UI hacks for NON - UI developers, let me know what you think.

Vinodh

Building FullStack Serverless Application using AWS-SAM — Part 3

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Thu, 10 Sep 2020 06:27:05 +0000

I have got some traction in my channel metrics and most of the flow is from DEV.to. Thanks for the support.

Here is my 3rd part - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWc8aNK-NLQ

Building FullStack Serverless Application using AWS-SAM — Part 2

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Fri, 04 Sep 2020 03:52:01 +0000

https://youtu.be/QQsDMCxYmOQ

AWS Serverless using SAM Series

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Wed, 02 Sep 2020 15:31:35 +0000

It will be great if yall will support and help me take this to completion, posting here for accountability :-)
https://medium.com/@vinodh.thiagarajan/building-fullstack-serverless-application-using-aws-sam-part-1-9bcd54c0e8fe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKeMwhGQWCU

Microservices Patterns - Chris Richardson and what you will learn from it

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Fri, 07 Aug 2020 00:35:13 +0000

https://medium.com/@vinodh.thiagarajan/i-thought-i-knew-about-microservices-851b906ad46d

OAuth'ing Bad - Understanding OAuth 2.0s Authorization Grant Flow

Vinodh Thiagarajan — Sat, 16 May 2020 04:41:09 +0000

Out of all the OAuth Flows, I feel like Authorization Grant Flow brings almost all the possible platoons in making up the OAuth protocol. Remembering the key components and their roles are key. In order to explain the following terms,

Resource Owner
Client
Authorization Server
Authorization EndPoint
Token End Point
Auth Code
Bearer Token
Protected Resource and how they are all wired together. But just that I will be using Breaking Bad Analogy to explain the same. Below are image and the link to my hosted video that does the same.