The Palindrome in 2026

What's coming

Hey! It's Tivadar.

Yes, I know that it is February. It took me a bit longer to write this post.

I also know that your inbox is (was) overloaded with triumphant 2025 reviews and grand plans for 2026. To respect your time, here's a no-bullshit summary of what you'll get from The Palindrome this year, and if you want the details, just read on.

All subscribers:

• I'm finishing my Machine Learning From Zero book this year, where we'll implement all the fundamental algorithms from scratch. This'll be the topic for my technical posts.

• I'll do more explainer-style videos, like this one from the Matrices and Graphs post.

Paid subscribers:

• Monthly live workshops, streamed live right here on Substack.

• First workshop: Mathematics of Machine Learning, March 7th, 15:00 - 20:00 CET.

• Second workshop: Neural Networks from Scratch, date TBD.

---

Exactly one year ago, I entered into the last phase of creating the Mathematics of Machine Learning book. The content was ready; we just had to shape the draft into a book.

Every writer has their unique experience, but there’s one thing that everyone agrees upon: editing is a lot of work. Soon, I found out that “a lot” means that “backbreaking, grueling, Herculean” amount. The entire book is about seven hundred pages, and during the editing process, I used to proofread it from top to bottom in about twelve hours. (And there are still errors.)

The book launched on May 29th, and I was finally ready to focus on The Palindrome once again fully.

Since then, we went from

• 90 posts to 170,

• from 16835 subscribers to 39663,

• and from 80 paid subscribers to 611.

The support you gave me is incredible. I had several careers before: mathematician, researcher, machine learning engineer, and startup founder. But this is the happiest I’ve ever been. I love to teach, you love to learn, and I’m grateful that you are here.

So, what’s coming this year?

Building The Palindrome Team

Whenever I’m not working on a post, video, course, workshop, or whatever, I’m constantly thinking about how to bring more value to you. Pretty soon, I realized I was the bottleneck and needed partners to join me on the mission.

Do you remember distill.pub? It was one of the best machine learning publications, with incredibly insightful explanatory articles and insane production value. (Check it out if you haven’t; it’s a super valuable learning resource.) Distill inspires me a lot, and I want The Palindrome to reach the same level of quality with shorter, more focused articles and higher throughput.

Alberto Gonzalez was the first one to join the team. Although he is a brilliant computer scientist with a background in competitive programming, he is primarily responsible for growing the newsletter.

One of my main goals next year is to build a team of regular contributors: educators who are skilled in their craft and passionate about teaching. I’ll talk about the details soon.

Taking the live lectures to the next level

Last year, we launched The Palindrome Lectures as well, a live series of lectures focused on one topic per season. The first topic was Neural Networks From Scratch. (There are still one or two sessions remaining, which I’ll continue soon.)

The lectures will continue this year, exclusive to paid subscribers. However, I’ll change the format: instead of giving one lecture every two weeks, I’ll offer 4- to 6-hour workshops, completing the entire course in one day.

The topics:

• Mathematics of Machine Learning (launching in March),

• and Neural Networks From Scratch (second iteration, launching sometime during April).

The first workshop (Mathematics of Machine Learning) will be held on March 7th, 15:00 - 20:00 CET. I’ll send out the reminders soon. This time, instead of Google Meet, I’ll teach live right here on Substack.

More videos

I also overcame my shyness about speaking English in public (which is not my native language) and dove deep into video: live coding streams, discussions, and 3B1B-style narrated videos. I realized that video is the best format for my work.

So, I won’t surprise you: this is the direction I’ll go.

In the future, I aim to publish all of my technical content in video form. Don’t worry, I’ll always publish the written versions, and each will have an accompanying animated video. So far, I remastered five of my old posts in the video format:

• The Fascinating Story of the Exponential Function

• The Single Most Undervalued Fact of Linear Algebra

• The Camel Principle

• Babylonians Used This Algorithm 4000 Years Before Newton,

• and Why is the Golden Ratio Hiding in the Fibonacci Sequence?

(I also launched a YouTube channel for my video content. Please subscribe if you enjoy my work. Your support is much appreciated.)

Investing in tooling

I write all my posts in Jupyter Notebooks (in fact, I wrote the entire Mathematics of Machine Learning book in notebooks), which is great for diving deep into math with code, but it’s a pain to convert my posts to Substack. I used to manually convert every LaTeX block and code snippet into images, which took hours of my time.

So, I opened my wallet, forked out the juicy $200 per month for the Claude Code subscription, and started building a tool to automate the tedious part of my work.

This became nb2wb (short for notebook to web), a free and open-source tool that helps technical writers publish their Jupyter Notebooks on major online blogging platforms like Substack, X, Hashnode, and others. (The project is available on GitHub; I’ll put it on PyPI soon.)

Overall, this “tooling for technical content creators” direction resonates deeply with me. I’m passionate about education, and every time I get the urge to build something, I always end up there. So, expect more tools like nb2wb.

---

That’s it in a nutshell; I don’t want to take any more of your time. Thank you for being here and reading this. It’s an honor for me, and I’ll keep working on bringing more knowledge to your inbox.

Cheers,
Tivadar