About the author

Normally an author would write this in the third person, as the publisher may not know much about the author and can’t write it for them, but I will write it in the first person.

I’m Tariq Shams, a person who has always been fascinated by Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (yes, the entire acronym).

People aren’t their job titles or degrees, but I am a Senior Software and AI Engineer who has worked professionally in finance and gaming. I have done iOS development, pure backend, pure frontend and full stack; worked on developer tools; built ML models from scratch (including LLMs); built agentic workflows; and fine-tuned LLMs in production, with evals. I came first in the NVIDIA GTC 2026 Vibe Hackathon, receiving a signed RTX 5080 from NVIDIA’s CEO, Jensen Huang, and presented the architecture on an NVIDIA livestream.

I have a BS in Computer Science with a minor in Math, and an MBA, which I earned while working at a bank as an engineer, because I really wanted to understand the business in more depth.

Back in my Computer Science undergrad, before the first version of ChatGPT was released, I won first place in my college’s engineering competition by creating an AI music generator that modeled music on a sheet as a language task with a temporal element. I also built a compiler for a subset of Java, having taken theoretical computer science (automata theory) under the late and sadly missed Prof. Lawrence L. Larmore, and Compilers under Prof. Jan “Matt” Bækgaard Pedersen, who wrote Practical Compiler Construction (the phoenix book, not the dragon book).

All that to say, while I am not making compilers in my sleep (I have a lot of respect for you if you are such a person), I hadn’t found anything like what I had built, hence this book exists. Hopefully it is enjoyable.