$ cat about.md

About me

I'm Matvey Evdokimov, a Computer Science & Mathematics student at the University of St Andrews. I like understanding things at the level where they stop being magic: what backpropagation actually computes, why a cache miss costs what it costs, how an option's price responds to volatility.

That instinct shapes how I work. Instead of only taking courses, I rebuild the core artifacts myself — an automatic differentiation engine, language models trained from raw characters — and I ship real products: I co-founded LetMeCook and built its backend from authentication to cloud storage.

I speak English (C2) and Russian (native), with elementary French, and I'm currently looking for a software engineering internship where I can bring that first-principles mindset to real systems — especially in machine learning or quantitative finance.

$ timeline

  1. 2026

    Regression, evaluated honestly

    Built a regression study on the tips dataset with baselines, leak-free preprocessing pipelines, and 5-fold cross-validation. Model selection rested on paired fold-wise differences, which showed the richer feature sets add nothing measurable over a single predictor — and that one held-out split would have concluded otherwise.

  2. 2025 — now

    Neural networks from first principles

    Implemented micrograd (a scalar autograd engine with dynamic computation graphs) and the makemore series of character-level language models. Completed Andrew Ng's Machine Learning Specialisation and Andrej Karpathy's Neural Networks: Zero to Hero. Reading Option Volatility and Pricing in parallel.

  3. 2025 — now

    Co-founder & Backend Developer, LetMeCook!

    Designed and built the Express.js REST API behind a deployed cooking web app: JWT authentication, user profiles, dietary preferences, recipe-generation workflows, and AWS S3 image storage. Contributed to the Next.js frontend.

  4. 2025 — now

    Teaching assistant, A&J School / A&J Education

    Supported students during online lessons by explaining concepts, answering questions, and providing individual guidance. Assisted teachers with lesson preparation, marking assignments, and tracking student progress.

  5. 2024 — 2028

    BSc Computer Science & Mathematics, University of St Andrews

    Coursework across data structures and algorithms, object-oriented programming, computer systems and C, relational databases, linear algebra, probability, and statistics. Active member of the Computer Science Society.

$ skills

Languages

  • Python
  • C
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • SQL
  • R

Machine Learning

  • PyTorch
  • Neural networks
  • Automatic differentiation
  • Backpropagation
  • Model training & evaluation

Web & Backend

  • Node.js
  • Express.js
  • Next.js
  • React
  • REST APIs
  • WebSockets
  • JWT
  • AWS S3

Systems & Foundations

  • Memory management
  • pthreads & concurrency
  • CPU pipelines & caching
  • Data structures & algorithms
  • Relational databases
  • Git / GitHub

Quantitative finance

  • Probability
  • Statistics
  • Numerical Optimisation
  • Multivariable Calculus
  • Linear Algebra