Khalid Yusuf Dahir
roadmapblog

Khalid
Yusuf
Dahir

Software developer turned AI researcher. Four years building Somalia's first Electronic Health Record system—serving 100+ clinics nationwide. Now studying transformers from first principles.

The kind of engineer who needs to understand what's underneath. Not just use the tools—build the intuition for why they work.

Currently

  • →7-domain math roadmap
  • →NEURON research workbench
  • →Transformer implementation

Location

Mogadishu, Somalia

Elsewhere

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Research Log

Apr 2026

The Mental Maps That Made ML Click

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Frozen functions, two timelines, loss as a thermometer, backprop as blame assignment. The pictures underneath the function calls.

Apr 2026

Seven Chapters Deep: What Linear Algebra Looks Like From the Inside

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Seven chapters of Strang. Nullspaces, eigenvalues, SVD—computed by hand. What you see in transformers after building the math underneath.

Mar 2026

What Doing Linear Algebra by Hand Showed Me About Transformers

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LU decomposition, column spaces, and the dot product—computed by hand, chapter by chapter. What you start seeing in transformers when you do the mathematics yourself instead of reading about it.

Mar 2026

The Journey from Software Developer to AI Researcher

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A personal chronicle of the path from building production systems to understanding what happens inside a transformer. Vectors, Word2Vec, attention mechanisms, and the mathematics underneath it all.

Built in the pre-AGI era