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Summer slowdown? Not at TDS. As new and exciting developments continued to unfold in the world of large language models and AI agents, our authors shared smart and actionable insights on cutting-edge tools and approaches, and published some of our most widely circulating articles of the year.
Read on to discover — or revisit — July’s most popular stories. They cover the inner workings of agentic-AI workflows and Python optimization (among many other topics), and also include a cluster of top-notch reflections on data and ML careers in a rapidly changing job landscape.
A Developer’s Guide to Building Scalable AI: Workflows vs Agents
As Haily Quach explains in our most-read article of the past month, it’s crucial to understand the architectural trade-offs between autonomous agents and orchestrated workflows — and practitioners on the ground (like you!) stand to gain a lot by making informed product decisions.
How to Fine-Tune Small Language Models to Think with Reinforcement Learning
In the mood for a technical deep dive? Avishek Biswas delivers an excellent guide to SLM fine-tuning with PyTorch.
Run Your Python Code up to 80x Faster Using the Cython Library
Learn how you can combine the speed of C with Python’s versatility and flexibility — Thomas Reid presents a four-step plan for integrating the Cython library into your code.
Career Insights in the Spotlight
Are many of you getting ready for a Fall job search? It certainly looked that way, with several of July’s most popular articles focused on career paths and advice for long-term growth.
Lessons Learned After 6.5 Years Of Machine Learning, by Pascal Janetzky
My Honest Advice for Aspiring Machine Learning Engineers, by Egor Howell
What I Learned in my First 18 Months as a Freelance Data Scientist, by CJ Sullivan
Other July Highlights
More tools, more analysis, more hands-on guidance! Don’t miss our other top reads of the month:
- Software Engineering in the LLM Era, by Stephanie Kirmer
- Become a Better Data Scientist with These Prompt Engineering Tips and Tricks, by Sara Nobrega
- Hitchhiker’s Guide to RAG with ChatGPT API and LangChain, by Maria Mouschoutzi
- Building a Сustom MCP Chatbot, by Mariya Mansurova
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