How to Do Skill Building Exercises

Welcome to the skill building repository! This is where you're going to do most of your skill building work throughout the course.

The Exercises Directory

The most important directory here is exercises, where you'll find each section organized by topic and day.

The structure looks something like this:

exercises/01-retrieval-skill-building/
├── 01.01-retrieval-intro
├── 01.02-bm25
├── 01.03-retrieval-with-bm25
├── 01.04-embeddings
├── 01.05-rank-fusion
└── 01.06-query-rewriting

You have retrieval skill building, then retrieval project work, retrieval day two skill building, retrieval day two project work, and so on.

Two Types of Exercises

Inside each section, you'll find a set of exercises. Some are explainers with just a readme.md and code to explore. Others are problem and solution pairs where you do the work yourself.

Explainer Exercises

Explainer exercises are designed to teach you concepts without requiring you to write code from scratch.

Here's what an explainer looks like:

01.02-bm25/
└── explainer
    ├── api
    ├── client
    ├── how-does-bm25-work.png
    ├── main.ts
    └── readme.md

The 01.01-retrieval-intro exercise, for example, is just a readme.md with some diagrams about the importance of retrieval. The 01.02-bm25 explainer includes a readme.md and a main.ts file that runs a local dev server.

Problem and Solution Exercises

Problem and solution exercises require you to complete tasks, with a solution provided for reference.

Here's what a problem and solution pair looks like:

01.03-retrieval-with-bm25/
├── problem
│   ├── api
│   ├── client
│   ├── main.ts
│   └── readme.md
└── solution
    ├── api
    ├── client
    └── main.ts

The problem folder contains the code where you'll do the work, while the solution folder shows the completed implementation.

Running the Exercises

To run any exercise, open the terminal and execute:

pnpm dev

This will allow you to choose which exercise you want to run. You can use autocomplete to find exercises by their number or name.

For example, you can type 1.2 or BM25 to find the BM25 exercise:

? Which exercise do you want to run?
01.02-bm25

Completing Exercises

For explainers, your job is to:

• Review the instructions in the readme.md
• Understand the concepts presented
• Explore the playground or code examples

For instance, with the BM25 explainer, you'll explore the BM25 playground, review the dataset, test some basic keyword searches, and test different search queries to understand BM25 better.

For problem and solution exercises, your job is to:

• Follow the steps in the readme.md
• Complete the code tasks in the problem folder
• Check off steps as you complete them
• Reference the solution folder if you need help

To switch to a different exercise or view the solution, cancel out and run pnpm dev again. Select the same exercise number, then choose between problem and solution.

Video Support

Every single exercise has an accompanying video from me explaining everything in depth. For problem and solution exercises, there's a separate video for both the problem walkthrough and the solution.

The Feedback Loop

By doing these exercises, you're going to get a really tight feedback loop. This approach has proven to work again and again in my courses because it lets you practice immediately and see results right away.

You're all set! Let's get started.