Projects — Overview

Build From Scratch is about implementing individual components for the insight of having built them. This section is about complete projects — systems with a real problem, a real dataset, a real evaluation, and (from Level 4 up) a real deployment, portfolio-worthy and interview-worthy in a way an isolated from-scratch exercise isn't.

What's in this section

The Project Ladder — six levels, from a tiny afternoon project to a genuine capstone, each with the standard project structure and representative examples at that level.
Problem Statement Atlas — a living directory of concrete problem statements across the domains most worth a real project, tracking each one's status from not-started through content-only to an actual built project.

The Standard Project Structure

Every project on the ladder, regardless of level, is scoped using the same template — the ML System Design framework applied at project scale:

Project
 ├── Problem           — what specifically are you solving, for whom
 ├── Dataset            — where the data comes from, and its known limitations
 ├── Baseline            — the simplest thing that could possibly work, built first
 ├── Architecture         — what you're actually building, and why over alternatives
 ├── Training              — how it's trained, tracked, and made reproducible
 ├── Evaluation             — the metrics that actually matter for this problem
 ├── Deployment              — how it's served (Level 4+)
 ├── Monitoring               — how you'd know if it broke in production (Level 4+)
 ├── Cost                      — what it actually costs to run
 ├── Failure analysis           — where it breaks, and why
 └── GitHub                      — a public, documented artifact

Every level below fills this template out with a different amount of rigor — a Level 1 project's "deployment" section might just be "runs locally," while a Level 4 project's is a real serving architecture. The template doesn't change; the depth expected at each field does.

See the roadmap for the full ladder.