Tiep Tran

My list of RSS feeds

Tiep Tran — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham - YC founder. Food for thoughts
Lilian Weng - AI researcher, prev @ OpenAI -> co-founded Thinking Machine Lab -> back to OpenAI 2026. Incredible resources into RL, AI agents, Self improving agents…
Mario Zechner - SWE, open-source developer, entrepreneur and angel investor. Pi coding agent creator. Great insights into coding agent harnesses. Mario has a really intriguing recommended reading list

Colophon

Tiep Tran — Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After various iterations of different designs, layout, frameworks,… i’m happy with the current state of this website. This website is made with the static site generator Hugo and is hosted on Netlify (Domain from here too.)

These are a few constraints i want to have in my digital garden:

Files over app
Outlives the framework
Minimal, text-based design
No bloat, dead simple
Function over form
Privacy*: JS for the image lightbox and Cloudflare Web Analytics for aggregate performance and usage metrics.

I found beauty behind minimalistic websites that embrace intentional and thoughtful writing. Even though i still think visual flairs and motion design are great ways to show one’s visual identity, i also believe the lack of such elements, if planned carefully, can be a design choice itself that is focused and personal.

A note to Artemis II

Tiep Tran — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Orion was launched on Wednesday, Apr 1st, 2026. Watching this launch was nothing short of incredible, not just for NASA but also for all humanity on Earth.

As the crew members make their way to the Moon, i have nothing but best wishes to these brave and amazing men and woman.

“Anything is possible if you put your mind and heart to it.” - Astronaut Christina Koch

Rec2Note

Tiep Tran — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What

Rec2Note is a CLI tool for turning your lecture recording into hyper-focused markdown notes.

Why

As a student, i love lecture recordings are great for:

exam review
finding a topic you just know the professor mentioned but couldn’t remember
taking detailed notes of lecture topic
… However, sitting through hours of lecture recording is not optimized for active learning or time management.

How

Rec2Note aims to solve this via extracting a transcript from the lecture recording, running it through multiple specialed LLM agents to generate markdown note containing:

A Note On Mob Psycho 100

Tiep Tran — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Everyone should give Mob Psycho 100 a watch

Whether you are an anime fan or not, this has quickly become my top recs for people looking for a good series with top tier character development.

My friend Jack introduced me to this show in the summer of ’25, and it’s probably one of the most incredible shows I’ve ever seen. The story follows Mob - a high school student with psychic abilities - who is trying to live a normal life while balancing school and his job at “Spirits and Such Consultation”, an office run by Reigen - a self-proclaimed “Greatest Psychic of the 21st Century”. I could go on about the story, but I wholeheartedly believe going in blind is the best way to experience it.

Matcha Bank Reconciliation System

Tiep Tran — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What

CS Capstone for UC'26. Matcha is an automated bank reconciliation system. Aim to reduce manual bank statement and receipts matching while keeping human in the loop for review and reconciliation override.

Why

Manual bank reconciliation is a fragmented, time-consuming and error-prone process.

How

Matcha has 3 core components:

Documents parsing pipeline using Visual Language Model (VLM)
Reconciliation matching algorithm
Centralized dashboard for viewing and exporting reports

Notable features:

VLM parsing pipeline replace traditional OCR + NLP pipeline with better accuracy.
AI generated reconciliation summary on unmatched transactions and provide next step.
Per account book document retention policy for better financial document security and operation cost.

Stacks:

DLP GAN Implementation

Tiep Tran — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

What

Final project for CS5173_DeepLearning. The objective was to implement and evaluate Draw Landscape Pictures (DLP) GAN model proposed for generating Chinese landscape paintings.

Why

Adversarial learning has been my area of interest and after learning about Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) in this course, i wanted to explore how we can leverage this technology to re-imagine art under a different lens.

We’ve seen an extensive amount of GAN models trained on prominent Western art culture (Van Gogh, Claude Monet, …) but research and application on Asian art style are minimal in the current landscape. This is why the DLP paper stood out to me as an interesting topic to dive deeper. The novelty of this model came from its Dual-Consistency Loss, which aims to balance realism and abstraction by enforcing consistency at the semantic and feature levels.

Sumitup Dev

Tiep Tran — Fri, 18 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sumitup.dev is archived. It was a really fun project for me and i learned a lot about making a simple agent using PocketFlow. I’m now switching from newsletters to news aggregator and blogs RSS feeds (find my current list of RSS feeds i subscribed to here.). I’m also developing a simple RSS reader webapp and will be opensourced later…

What

Sumitup.Dev is a web blog for curated tech newsletters with an AI Agent for news summary and trend analysis.

Things i believe in

Tiep Tran — Wed, 11 Nov 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Creative designs and developments philosophy

“Good design is as little design as possible” - Dieter Rams

Function over form
Outlives the frameworks
Design intentionally
Solve the problem, do not showcase the tech stack
Good project have quantifiable goals
Don’t search for the perfect framework
To learn is to fail

Technology

Files over app
Debloat your digital presence

Daily life

Take meaningful break. Watch with intention.
Listen with intention. Play with intention.
Browse with intention. Take control over your
impulse. FOCUS. Limit scrolling. Days become weeks,
weeks become months and months become years. Watch
your dopamine. Go analouge. Just start. Please talk
to your love ones. Excercise everyday. Health is
a virtue. Nature is beautiful. Take picture everyday.
Enjoy arts. Support local theatres. Wake up early.
Stay hydrated. Sekiro taught you life lesson.
Stop making everyone like you, you dont even like
everyone. Keep physical notebook. Sketch more.
Avoid over stimulation. Be bored, embrace boredom.
Face your thoughts. Love yourself. Dont try to
change yourself overnight. Action precedes motivation.